CISSP Exam March 24 2018

[KayS]

Hello all!

I sit for my CISSP exam on Sat morning. I have been studying since late Jan 2018. I've attended a boot camp, read the official ISC2 training guide CISSP CBK, read the Sybex official study guide book, watched the Cybrary videos by Kelly H, and I've been taking the sybex practice exams. On Wed I will begin to read the 11th hour. On the practice exams I'm scoring pretty well, with my highest passing score so far at 88%. However i am concerned because I've been reading post where ppl mention the practice exam questions are totally different from the real thing. Seems everything with the name CISSP in the title also follows with "OFFICIAL" study guide or "OFFICIAL" training guide..."OFFICIAL study questions etc...but the questions are not even remotely similar? how can that be?  This exam has had my emotions all over the place, one day i'm excited and sure i'll pass, then other days not so much! its been a roller coaster ride. With the price of this exam and all the info you need to cover it would be nice to have a real "OFFICIAL" study guide and truly "OFFICIAL" study/practice test!

Best regards

[Iban]

Hi there, KayS,

I tryed the certification exam about two or three months ago. As you, I used very diverse material for preparing the exam and one day I was feeling unbeatable, while the next I was sure I was going to fail. The information I had was too much... different one from the other.

But, in fact, that is a good new: the wider, the better. The reason is that the exam will be totally different from the simulators you've used, or the pdf questionaries you've studied. The key for passing is not studing for the exam, but studing for learning.

I had never seen questions like the ones I found in the exam but I hit the answers, because somewhere I had read something remotely similar that I could apply to that question. And this happened question after question.

So this is my advice: don't get nervous if you see that one text differ from the other, or that the questions that you find in one simulator are totally different from the ones at the back of a test book. This will prepare you for the exam, believe me.

Best regards and good luck,

Iban.

[nagarajan]

Hello Kays,

Any practice exam/simulator is best for testing your knowledge in each domain as well as it helps in managing time in the exam. I used cccure for time management and testing my strong and weak areas (domain wise/topic). 

I read the topics multiple times and ensured that I have cleared all my doubts before going for the exam. During the exam you must relax and pay attention to the question and think what would be the solution that you would pick for the problem mentioned in the exam question.

I relied on my understanding of the problem, knowledge of the domain and a practical approach to address the problem/requirement.

Good luck.

Nagarajan

[Shannon]

To supplement what @Iban & @nagarajan stated, when you're taking the CISSP exam, you generally make use of a combination of the following: -

1. Subject knowledge.
2. Experience & exposure.
3. Practice questions.

1 and 2 would both be essential. As I posted in my reply to Share Your Story: When You Passed Your CISSP Exam, I used only 1 & 2 with my earlier exams --- such as the CEH, CCNA, and ITIL --- but had to make use of 3 for my CISSP.

Using question banks will get you accustomed to interpreting the questions, relating them to subject domains, & ruling out incorrect options --- effectively a trump card to play when you encounter new questions & have to bank on your accumulated knowledge and experience / exposure.

Just ensure that the answers / explanations in the question banks make perfect sense, and can be related to information in the CISM domains, as provided by (ISC)2.

[Shannon]

CISSP domains*

[KayS]

Thank you so much, I just want to be sure I am not studying material that will not help me reach my goal!

[Wayne_Evans]

Good Luck - hard work will pay off

Totally mirror what Shannon D'Cruz did. Understanding and experience is the key, and practice exams to get you in the right frame of mind to allow you to draw on Shannon's well put 1&2 !

Wayne