Battled the beast and won! · CISSP Study Group

Vivek Sridhar

15d (edited) • 🙋‍♂️ CISSP

Battled the beast and won!

Took my exam yesterday and it cut me off after the 100 question mark.

I filled up the endorsement form and the waiting game begins.

Special thanks to

@Vincent Primiani

for building such a supportive, encouraging community.

More details:

Exam prep:

Materials (most helpful to least helpful): Kelly Handerhan CISSP audio, Pete Zerger's exam cram, Destination cert videos on youtube, clarification of concepts and application on ChatGPT, Prabh Nair coffee shots, Destination cert book, Sybex CISSP prep book. I learn well on videos (visually) and brief explanations - don't judge me on the books being last on the prep.

Questions (only free stuff): Destination cert app, Learnzapp app, Andrew Ramdayal 50 hard cissp questions, Daily questions from @Vincent Primiani , youtube videos from just about every channel that said "CISSP question #", ChatGPT and Gemini daily quizzes, random questions on quizlet. These help boost confidence in the material that you know but are definitely not representative of the exam questions.

Also important, your prep should stop a week before your exam. You need let the information soak and become second nature when you encounter a practice question - Ex: something something HTTPS - relevant concepts: Diffie Hellman key exchange, symmetric+asymmetric, port 443, App layer security, TLS, etc. Find keywords in the question and stuff associated with it should just flow through your brain automagically.

Honestly nothing can fully prepare you for the exam. The best kind of practice questions are questions that offer scenarios and give you options to pick the best/least/first/last choice. Generally all answers are correct, some are more correct than others.

My exam experience was very familiar to the PMP last year at the same location and cleared it, so similar that I got assigned the same computer, lol! Although the test gives you 180 minutes, you lose about 4 minutes out the gate with the NDA and other administrative stuff. Also, bring two different IDs.

In the beginning, whatever part of the test is not timed, use that opportunity to take a knowledge dump of stuff that you probably want to reference later (in my case, the OSI layer > protocols > ports etc).

I got about 30% technical questions but the rest were just reading comprehensions. You'd do well to raise your reading speed and understand quickly what the question is asking. Take your time (approx 2 mins/ question) with the first 30 questions and do your best to answer them correctly. If you start encountering questions that you feel you know nothing about, you're on the right track to pass the exam.

This video is really good to give you a perspective: https://youtube.com/shorts/uwBzDyMqgdM?si=njiEfTWHZJxAu1ml

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