Failed CISSP - big time disappointment

[seaside]

I read many posts from people who failed the new CISSP adaptive exam. I myself failed it on 3/5/18.  I expected to do 250 questions but I was very shocked that I got knocked out after 99/100 questions.  I asked the proctor whether I was given the wrong exam. The proctor explained to me that because it is an adaptive exam the so it stopped because I didn't answer a certain number of questions correctly; I was absolutely horrified what I experienced.  I could not sleep all night after the exam day, I've been studying for it for over 3 months and I scored between 77% - 85% of dozens of practice tests of over 3,000 questions.  I went beyond by reading front to back cover of the Sybex - 7th Edition book and I completed all the chapter tests as well as all of the online practice tests that Sybex offered me and I did well. In addition I also went through all of Cybrary training videos, figuring that with all that studying I was well prepared to take the exam.  Not to mention that I have a master degree in IT and in Information Assurance field with the company for over 9 years.

I find the adaptive exam questions and answers are so abstract that I feel my English comprehension isn't good enough for it. I have reached out to ISC2 for their support and advice. I am so sad and disappointed that I am not sure if I ever want to take any test in the adaptive format. 

[Lamont29]

I don't know the business owner. I am speaking on the expectations of
(ISC)2 professionals. Thanks.

Lamont Robertson

[d46j48fx]

You are missing the point.

You have made a potentially libellous statement with regards to a
long-established exam preparation service provided by a respected member of
the ISC2 community with over 30 years "boots on the ground" and requisite
training experience from which many security professionals such as myself
have benefited. It is your prerogative to make such statements, but it is
ALSO your professional duty to substantiate your claim, or amend/remove
your comment.

Derek Lewinson, CISSP #598659
(C) 416-560-4779 | (E) djl@icgcan.com

[clementdupuis]

Good morning to all, As the owner and founder of CCCure let me step in and clear the air on these unfounded allegations. The CCCure quiz engine at https://cccure.education is today the best that it has ever been. We never ever used real exam questions or brain dump from the real exam. I despite websites that do as they seriously devalue the certification and allow people without the proper knowledge and skill to pass the exam and get 4 letters after their name. We believe in the holistic approach. The reason WHY some people don't like our Quiz Engine. We want you to pass the certification but we also want you to learn knowledge and skill while doing so. This way you can be a valuable member of any team you may be employed within. That to me is a lot more important than 4 letters after your name. We have the most extensive database of CISSP questions on the net. Every single question is written from scratch by us, some of them are contributed by members of the site (very few today), most are written by CISSP's and security professionals that we pay to write questions. On top of this, we have a thorough process in place to review and validate every single questions, ensuring it maps to one of the topic of the CBK and we even go as far as mapping every questions to the official study book or a publicly available reference. It is not MY opinion but a consensus that we use to justify the answer of every question by using references books, published documents from NIST and the US government and other relevant sources. Every single questions also contain explanation of the righ answer and the other choices as well. We have a great mix of choose the best choice answer, choose multiple answers, scenario based questions, drag and drop, as well as Hotspot. If someone has studied and remembered the pool of 1800 questions that we have, they have done some very serious study and totally deserve to pass this exam. Doing so, will require some serious time investment and some serious study as well. Sometimes, students will get all wrapped up because there is a question with a referenced that is a few year old. This does not mean it is NOT relevant. If you look at the list of references used for the exam that is published on the ISC2 website, you will see that more than 95% of them are multiple years old. That does not means it is bad, one must understand the exam is based on CONCEPTS, CONCEPTS, and more CONCEPTS. Some of these basic concepts will not change with time such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability, identification, authentication, authorization, etc... However, the tools and techniques may change a lot, but not the concept itself. Best regards to all and thanks to all that have responded and step up on CCCure behalf. We did not go to the dark force and we remain on the Jedi side. Best regards Clement clement.dupuis@cccure.com Owner and Founder of CCCure

[Beads]

No worries. Its been many years since I have looked at CCCure. It may have changed dramatically and find me talking straight out my backside. If this has changed please let us know so we are not publishing sketchy information.

Good discussion, folks.

- b/eads

[fortean]

Folks,

just for completeness sake: if it were really that easy to fake knowledge by doing a brain dump of answers of whatever questions CCCure offers, everybody would be a CISSP and these five letters would be degraded to a meaningless acronym.

Actually, many of the questions I found on CCCure in those days - remember, we're talking 2011 here - were not  even overly similar to those I found in the exam. But the CCCure questions (and their answers) do test your knowledge to a sufficient level to give you some confidence that you really have the necessary level of understanding. At least, that proved to be the case in 2011, and I have this from personal experience.

[d46j48fx]

I took the 6-hr, 250-question exam in 2017 and I did not recognize a single
question in terms of wording. What I DID notice was that my time on CCCURE
served me well in being able to understand what the question was asking and
working my way to the ISC2 response. I used to tell people the CISSP is a
truly a one mile wide, inch deep, English comprehension exam...I believe
that is still the case. The questions are written in such a way that
memorization will be close to useless because the purpose of the questions
is to test your understanding of concepts!

*Derek Lewinson, CISSP #598659*

[rslade]

OK, this is starting to get ridiculous. (Suits for libel? Get real ...)

I've known CCCure for almost 20 years now, although I haven't paid much
attention since they started charging for it.

Hey, Clement. How's the weather in Montreal?

Anywho, CCCure used to be a really handy and vital resource for studying for the
exam. As Clement said, it was the practice tests that were the main draw, and,
intitally, they were pretty good. Unfortunately, at the same time that they
started adding study guides and references to the site (circa 2003 or so), a lot of
the people who *had* been helped by the site decided to "give back," in the form
of contributing to the test bank.

This had an oddly negative effect. As I've noted elsewhere, creating proper test
questions is a non-trivial task. A lot of people wanted to help, but didn't have the
skills to create proper questions. So they just produced "trivia" style questions,
asking about random facts that they knew, but most people didn't. (Thess are also
"bar bet" style questions.) These don't represent the actual exam. A number of
people also scraped practice questions from various study guides, which aren't
based on actual security literature.

By 2006, when I was demonstrating the site to seminars, about 90% of the
questions you would encounter was this type of useless dreck.

As Clement has noted, the exam engine itself is a marvel. It allows you to tune
the domain and difficulty level of the test exam to almost exactly what you need
to study. Unfortunately, due to the "help" that Clement has received, the test
bank database itself has been polluted (with trivia questions) to the point that it's
hard to determine what utility the test exams actually have for those studying for
the exam.

====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@computercrime.org
The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has
become so much a part of life that if we are not careful, we
forget to be insulted by it. - The Time (of London), 1886
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://twitter.com/rslade
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
https://is.gd/RotlWB

[clementdupuis]

Good day, Rob, Fortunately, I moved away from Montreal and no longer have to deal with the cold weather and the amazing amount of snow they had this year. I am now enjoying the sun of Florida. As far as people contributing questions within the quiz engine, I can say with accuracy this is a VERY VERY small percentage of the questions today. It was the case years ago when it was totally FREE access. We mostly generated operation money by selling publicity and doing mass emails on behalf of other companies. We no longer do this and we do not do marketing for others anymore and we don't have dozens of banners anymore from third party. It was NOT well received by the users of the quiz engine and people prefer a clean interface without cluttering at a fair price. If you have not visited the site recently, I would recommend you do so. It is days and night compared to what it used to be years ago. When I see universities such as Kaplan using our quiz for their CISSP students instead of their own Transcender tests, I am pretty happy. They are a good judge of its content. Let's not turn this into a never ending thread. Bottom line is: You are doom if you do and you are doom if you don't. Anyone who has produced, published, generated, or authored any content available online will be criticized for it and there will never be total satisfaction. It puts a smile on my face when I see that most of the negative comments are from competitors who prefer trashing others than improving their content. Best regards to all Clement

[Beads]

@clementdupuis 

Now, I am going to have to set aside a little time this weekend to go through and see for myself what is current with the engine, suggest those with questions or doubt do the same. Sounds like you have taken things to the next level and have my thanks from many years ago, helping me prepare and successfully pass the CISSP. 

Keep up the good work.

- b/eads

[AlecTrevelyan]

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@rslade wrote:
OK, this is starting to get ridiculous. (Suits for libel? Get real ...)

---

I'm sure all involved thank you for dredging this up again fully 24 hours or more after the ruckus had died down!

The reality is, a defamatory statement was made which was rightly refuted. Of course it would be up to Clement if he felt his business had been damaged by the statement and he wanted to seek recompense through libel proceedings, hence the use of the phrase "potentially libellous statement". 😉