Hi Luke,
Please find my CISSP exam review below:
Thank you everyone for your best wishes. I passed CISSP exam yesterday and thank you Luke for giving us this wonderful platform :) This group is definitely a great supplement!
I would also like to thank everyone who contributed to my success – my family, for their support and sacrifice throughout my study period :) and my study partners, and my dearest friends especially Olu Sonny and Olga Jilani(I wish both of them all the very best for their exams next . ) who motivated every time when I was down with low confidence, especially the last 3 days before exam :).
This is the time which will shake your confidence level and makes you feel like rescheduling; feeling like giving up; I would like to point one thing here – don’t underestimate the knowledge you have gathered throughout your study and don’t doubt if you know enough or not. If you have studied more than one book and watched couple of video series, and did at least 3000 practice questions at least, you would have covered everything required for the exam! However, I should still say Sybex is enough for the exam purposes. But you should be thorough with Sybex if you are selecting only Sybex as your material.
If you feel you are not confident on that point, do refer other materials. Sybex practice tests are the closest to exam.
I have been studying from this year January (on and off) and started giving intensive study 3 months back.
I used following materials
Sybex
CBK – covered around 6 domains and took notes of them – which came to around 200 pages :). I took notes from CBK as it covered lot of deep information that other materials didn't cover; and I was not in a plan to revisit the book again :). So I noted down those points to refer before exam and I did :). I didn't take any notes from Sybex, because Sybex was my major source so I just highlighted all important points. I have studied Sybex at least 3 times.
Shon Harris – for few domains like Identity management, risk management, SDLC
Eric Conrad
David Miller, Sari Greene, Cybrary videos - not fully though.
Transcender, Sybex practice questions and few online sources – I took notes from these too.
One advice i would like to give is to plan your last 10 days properly. After studying for almost 8 months, I seriously needed one more day to revise the concepts and complete the targeted materials before the exam day. If I had planned everything properly, I would have covered them. Because I didn't cover everything I wanted, it made me nervous too - here I mean sunflower notes, kelly videos. Because of lack of time, I have covered only 4 domains each from sunflower and kelly videos on selected areas in which I was weak.
Seriously if I had one single day, I would have covered both of them fully :(
I stopped practicing 4 days before exam and I wanted to revise all the concepts I already know. But I stopped after doing enough practice questions – about 4000. One important advice: stop studying by at least 6pm of the day before exam. Just relax. I was studying very hard throughout the day before exam and became Fatigue on the exam day :(. That reduced my concentration of which I couldn't able to manage the time efficiently.
I marked many questions for review but I had only 15 minutes left for review as I utilized 5.45 hours to complete 250 questions itself because I was fatigued, so didn't review properly. Also note that while marking for review, I would suggest you to mark only the questions in which you really have doubt. If you have too many questions for review unnecessarily, and if there is not adequate time, you cannot do proper review of the real important one that needs a revisit.
Best of Luck and I wish all future CISSPs all the very best!!
Thank you.