I took the exam this past Saturday and was able to pass it. This was my first attempt at the exam but the prep for it was an intense 12 weeks including weekends.
In terms of my preparation, I started off with Sagar Bansal's Master Class program - https://cisspmasterclass.com which is a comprehensive training program which includes individual tests for each of the eight domains on the exam platform that is provided in the package. I highly recommend this training which he offers at a very reasonably priced. My other two book resources were ISC2's Official Study Guide (Michael Shapple, James Stewart and Darril Gibson) eighth edition and CISSP Exam Guide (Shon Harris, Fernando Maymi) eighth edition. All the questions from these books plus the ones from Sagar's platform added up to over 3000 questions, which I made sure I was scoring atleast 72-75% right before the exam. I also went through about 100 of IT DOJO questions when I first discovered it but then got busy with the reading of two books back to back.
About the exam, I felt the questions were tricky and frankly, for the first hour I had a tough time answering some of them and was able to get through only about 40 of them. However, I kept Sagar's advise in mind and did not answer questions until I went over them multiple times to make sure I understood correctly and the answer selected was not just a guess - although in one or two instances I did end up guessing. By the time I reached 100th question when the test stopped, I had 38 minutes of time left which meant if I had to go through remaining 50 questions, I would have less than 1 minute for each question for me to answer. Insofar as the domains covered by the questions, they were from across the board.
All in all, I think preparation is the key even though one may have work experience in one or two domains. For example, I've number of years of experience in some of the domains and was comfortable with the content I was reading up for the exam. However, I felt stumped in the way they phrase the question by padding it up and the answer options offered were so close that I would struggle with the selection.
Well, I'm glad it's over and it's a good feeling to have done it in the first attempt. I wish you all the best to those who are preparing to go through this journey.
- Ramzan
