I just took the certification exam yesterday, holding the "provisionally passed" congratulation letter in my hands... feelings are still great! The first few hours after it was still huge adrenaline and endorphins. After those worn, I ended up really exhausted, clapped out, feeling like my mind would blow and I needed huge rest, so I slept for 3 hours in the afternoon.
I'm in the field of IT service management and information security for 10 years, 13+ years in IT overall. During that time I went trough various positions - system engineer, quality lead, internal auditor, consultant, analytic, team manager... I earned CISA in 2010 and ITIL v3 Expert in 2015. Even with good insights to any of the CISSP domains I felt that this one won't be easy. I studied, attended 5-days long CISSP training with great lector last month to have chance to discuss matters and get deeper insights, used the official practice exams (from Sybex) and also some other practice exams I was able to find. I went trough 2000 practice questions (rough estimate) and was able to score 80-90% in any given 150-questions generated practice test. So I felt prepared for the exam, assuming that - if the level of official practice tests' difficulty is representative, I should have succeed.
So yesterday morning I approached the certification exam, bit nervous still, but determined. One question at the time, one after another... Not a single question (out of the 100 I attempted) was familiar to me from the practice tests I took. After first 10 questions I was like "oh, this is much harder than the practice exams I tried". And it really was. The difficulty and complexity of real exam questions was one level beyond the practice ones. Let's say the practice test questions were more into single principles, while the real exam was more about applied principles (joining more principles to single question). Many (really many) of the questions were about what is the BEST, LEAST, MOST CORRECT, PRIMARY, PRIORITY with 4 answers where all 4 were relevant/true and it was really not easy to select the "BEST". There were still some "easy" ones (for me), but not really many of those. Not being native English speaker was also disadvantage in several cases - as I didn't understood some words and I felt those were important to the question given. I would propose to (ISC)2 to include dictionaries into the testing environment. Exam should not examine your English skills, right?
The CAT - sometimes, just after I confirmed the answer to the question, it took a little time to get next one. AI was choosing next couple of questions for me, based on the previous answers. The exam ended after I replied to #100. I wouldn't bet on myself passing the exam at that moment. Happily I received the provisionally passing confirmation. Now I'm waiting for the official results. As I was not cheating at all, I expect that it should go smoothly.
Is there any register or list of CISSP certified professionals? Or at least some stats about how many CISSP holders are in particular country?
