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CISM 2013 seat - sincere question about the Review Manual

wearingmyrolexwearingmyrolex Member Posts: 58 ■■□□□□□□□□
in CISM
Dear All,

I'm not hard of learning ;) I'm CISSP plus a number of other things, a CCIE candidate, yet for the life of me I cannot work out how to use the CISM Review Manual..

I've tried reading it like a book. It's dry and pretty awful. I've left it this late to prep for my December 14th 2013 seat as I've had other commitments.

I'm just not sure how the Section 1 and Section 2 work? Logic tells me to read and digest Section 2 only. I have no idea how/why I would need to digest the task statements to the knowledge statements and if we will actually be tested on that portion?

Silly question, but I'm stuck. I WILL pay it forward in the future if one of you clever people helps me. I plan on reading 12 pages per day and testing using the official 900 q-set; covering the materials twice.

Help!
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    paul78paul78 Member Posts: 3,016 ■■■■■■■■■■
    Hello and welcome to TE forums. BTW - there's no reason to duplicate your post in multiple threads. Most people will read new posts in the forums that they are interested.

    As for your question, I think you will find that most ISACA materials are quite dull and dry as you already noticed. The ISACA materials are setup to be exactly that - a "review". I suspect the reason is that ISACA believes that anyone qualified to take and pass the exam is already qualified and should know the material.

    Generally speaking, I have found that ISACA exams are very straight-forward and based mostly on topics that are mentioned in the review manual. I actually like the ISACA exam format since it isn't based on rote knowledge and contains some subjective materials.

    When preparing for the CISM exam, I only skimmed through section 1 and read most of section 2. The review manual didn't really hold my interest very much so I did most of my preparation in the last 3-4 days before the exam. The Q&A however, I did find useful as a preparation guide. At the time that I took the CISM, the 900 question set wasn't available so if you are planning to use the CISM question db, I'm sure that the additional materials will be helpful.

    Good luck.
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    wearingmyrolexwearingmyrolex Member Posts: 58 ■■□□□□□□□□
    Thanks Paul. It's my 1st time on a forum, hence the replication ;)
    Really appreciate your feedback.

    I guess I will try the section 2 approach for my 1st read, as I really don't see the point of Section 1. All the information is contained withing Sec 2 and it seems Sec 1 is a key, showing you which sections of Sec 2 support the requirement in Sec 1 (mental).

    I'm starting my 40 day countdown to the exam today, 12 pgs per day with the relevant questions from the 900-q-set. I should finish in 15 days or so and have a better understanding of what to re-read and if I DO need to refer to the dreaded Section 1.

    I'm hearing really good things about the 900q-set from other CISMs and CISMs-to-be, regarding reading the full explanation as to why the answer is correct, not just that the answer is correct. Let's see...

    Again, thanks for your input. Seems to be some great people on this site....
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