Encouraging Words About CISSP

A former student wrote in yesterday to tell me:

” I passed the exam last Wednesday.  A few observations on my experience:

1.  Like others posting their results to LinkedIn recently, my exam cut off at the 100 question mark.  My elapsed time at that point was somewhere between 90 and 100 minutes.

2.  Candidly, the first thought that passed through my mind when the exam cut off was that I failed, because...

3.  A lot (I would estimate 60-70%) of the questions required a good deal of domain knowledge synthesis to answer.  By that, I mean the question wasn't just asking for a fact or straightforward application of domain knowledge.  I got about 50 questions into the exam and considered walking away from the test, I thought I was doing that poorly.  I really thought "OK, those first 25 or so were the 'evaluation' questions for future exams, now the real exam is starting" but the questions didn't change in style after that. 

4,  I really had to slow myself down to make sure I read the questions and answers correctly and thoroughly.  This is probably what saved me from failing, of course, since the result is only pass/fail there's no way to know if the answers I changed after re-reading the question and answer while thinking about every word were the correct choice.

5.  Notwithstanding the "synthesis" comment above, most questions did have 2 fairly obvious wrong or distractor answers.  It was deciding between the remaining two that created the most frustration.

6.  I did use current editions of both the Shon Harris and Mike Chapple texts and practice exams for preparation.  I guess that's why I was a bit surprised at the nature of the questions.  Practice exam questions from both books were for the most part more oriented toward straightforward domain knowledge demonstration.”

Great advice— SLOW DOWN, everybody. And remember that you can’t fail until you’re done. Good luck to you all!