I can tell you from someone who's taken and failed the CISSP examination, that I could not get through on sheer experience, memorization of questions and practice exams. I purchased subscriptions to a number of exam cram and simulated exams sites and had very high scores on everything.
When it came to the examination, on at least 25% of the questions I was totally in the dark.
Hopefully without violating my existing CC certification and ISC2 guidelines I can say there's a lot on software development lifecycles, project management, structured framework and principals that was a big part of the examination and knowing the best practices for a number of software development ecosystems was my downfall.
I have a colleague who recently graduated from a 4-year college in Computer Science and passed the examination without even studying. This showed me how much of the software development curriculum and securing these platforms was involved in the examination.
It does not appear that memorization of questions/answers will get you through the adaptive examination.
It will change questions and point values per question based on previous answers and can be very tricky if you start to answer high value questions.
I can say that after taking the exam and seeing my results, I believe my experience as a infrastructure & access engineer got me through 5 domains easily but the 6th & 7th domains I was just competent in and the 8th domain was focusing on SLDC gave me thew most trouble.
-Mark
