Passed CISSP Oct2015-Week3 (5 weeks study)

Hi All,

I passed my CISSP exam this week. I'm an infosec professional with 19 years IT experience. My journey preparing for the CISSP exam started on 10/Sept/2015. The past 5 weeks included intense studying, had to literally give up all the frills life had to offer. I was thankful my wife understood the need for me to have total free time at home to study (she managed everything at home along with the kids for the past 5 weeks), for those of you who are married and with kids, you do need your spouse to support you in your endeavour. I have outlined my approach on studying for the exam below.

1. Cybrary.it videos (Rating 9/10) ---> Great and awesome materials, I'm going to donate some $$'s to them now. Kelly H. is bang on in her teaching and in highlighting the important topics. I viewed all the online videos in 1.5X speed since I found the default speed too slow. It also helped me cover the material fast. In the last 2 days, I viewed around 60% of the videos again as a refresher at 1.8X speed.
2. MP3 audio files downloaded from MH site by Shon Harris (Rating 8/10) ---> Though the audio material does seem a bit outdated, I have to say I did learn a real lot by listing to Shon's explanations. These audio files are top class, I couldn't have done it without them. I listened to them in 1.7X speed in VLC player.
3. Book: CISSP study guide 2nd Edition (Eric Conrad): The book covers just the material required and is a pretty easy read (unlike the long explanations in the Shon Harris book), though in my opinion it does need an update since all the new materials are not in it.
4. Book: Sybex CISSP 7th Edition Study Guide: This book covered all the new materials that I felt were missing in the Eric Conrad and the Shon Harris books. The explanations provided on some of the topics also opened up my mind to the different possibilities.
5. Book: Shon Harris 6th Edition: I just read the Governance, Risk Management & the BCP topics from here, I couldn't read beyond that, found the explanations too long and holding the heavy book in the hands was getting painful.
6. For practice tests I did a couple of chapters from the MH website Shon Harris practice tests. I also tried the Conrad online tests, but didn't like them much. After seeing a lot of comments here about freepracticetests.org, I went ahead and spent the 50$ on those, however I feel I could have saved the 50$ and instead donated those to the Cybrary.it site (I didn't like freepracticetests.org questions much, but the study materials in the question explanations were very handy, for those of you who have taken the freepracticetest.org subscription, I suggest you make a point to read through the explanations in the question answers). I also did the practice questions at the end of the 3 Shon Harris chapters mentioned above and the practice questions at the end of the Eric Conrad book. If any of you want to purchase the freepracticequestions.org subscription my suggestion is that you concentrate more on the explanations and the material provided for each question rather than the questions themselves.
7. These slides I found on the paladingrp.com website were awesome ! I'm not sure if any of you used it in the past but they contain a lot of useful information from the Shon Harris book. The author does state that the source is the Shon Harris AIO 5th edition book and a bit of the material is outdated, but they are very very useful from the exam perspective.
http://www.paladingrp.com/resources/cissp-v2.shtml
8. There were 2 forum members who had posted flash cards 'anki', I did find the flash cards pretty handy, my thanks go out to those people. For those of you who want the anki flash cards, just search in the 'passed' posts of the past 1 month and you'll find the posters who uploaded them.
9. I used part of the combined notes, but felt they had a couple of mistakes in between and also need an update. The sunflower review notes, the link to which one that one of the forum members provided were pretty handy.

As for the exam, it was a whopper... I took the full 6 hours and in terms of level of difficulty I'd rate it 'Very High". I think real world practical experience plays a big part in figuring the answers to some of the questions, and again like a lot of people say here 'Put on the management hat' to figure the correct answer. Once I was beyond 150 questions I was mind f**ked and really thought I was going to fail. I had marked a lot of questions for review and started my review in the last 8 minutes (Honestly almost ran out of time), quickly reviewed a few and found that out of 30 questions I reviewed I only ended up changing the answers on just 2 questions (I never ended up reviewing the rest of the questions, there were just too many marked for review). The hitch I noticed during the review is that you tend to talk yourself out of the correct answer, that's something I have also read from a lot of others. So in my opinion, the review really isn't worth it except for maybe a few handful of questions, for the rest just don't bother, you may end up changing a correct answer to a wrong answer. My advise to all of you is to not leave any question unanswered. You may just not get the time to complete it at the end of the exam, if you aren't sure of the answer, select the best possible answer and move on.

On a whole as far as the exam and the study efforts go, I feel I did learn a couple of new IT security concepts in the past 5 weeks that I can utilize at my work place !

I'd like to thank all the forum members who posted the 'passed' threads and their experiences over the past couple of weeks.

As for those of you who are studying for the exam, I wish you the very best in your efforts to get this cert !!!