CISSP EXAM Writer Insights. Worth Reading

Michael Samson-Metzger

Oct 17 • 📣 General

ISC2 CISSP Exam Writer insight. Disclaimer: Please do not ask for any questions on the exam or specific books to use)

Welcome to the Cult!

Your background is exactly the candidate we are looking for and it is actually why you passed at 100.

For those prepping…..

Study guides, cheat sheets, etc are great; but they can only take you so far. Experience and understanding will.

Understanding the concepts is PARAMOUNT. I cannot stress that enough. Trying to use practice exams to teach you and memorize answers, will definitely cause you to fail.

A little bit about the use of ChatGPT. Asking it for help figuring out information is “okay”, but I would not be over reliant on it for generating questions. But I will give a study tip that I used when I took mine over a decade ago.

There are a lot of resources now for you that can be used to determine where your weaknesses are. Instead of using ChatGPT to write a question for you. Write your OWN questions. Let me explain.

Think of it in 3 levels; easy, moderate, hard. If you don’t understand a concept, first, write an “easy” question and also write up “answers”. Pretend you are writing the exam. An easy one would be 1-2 sentences for example.

Once you understand the concept, write a moderately difficult one. 2-3 sentences.

By that time, you should understand it enough where you can make a difficult question; or as the OP put it, “wordy”. These are your scenario based ones.

If you can make it to that level, you would have “LEARNED” the topic instead of memorizing it. Which again, UNDERSTANDING it will get you to the holy grail of pass at 100.

There was one part about “tricky” questions. What you most likely experienced is the “questions are seeming like they are getting harder and impossible to answer”. That was a GOOD thing.

When you are taking the exam, you WANT the questions to get progressively harder. It will mean you are passing. My mentoree, after he passed, told me about he was sure that he was going to fail because the last few questions just seemed impossible and he felt like he was guessing.

That is kind of the point; do you have enough knowledge and experience to figure out the answer to the problem. Even one that you have never seen before. Because, that is the real world and we CISSPs are expected to be the experts.

Now, back to the OP; again, congratulations, welcome to the Cult. The easy part is over, now it’s the hard part. Keeping it.

The CPE’s can prove themselves harder than the exam. Because it never stops.

In my experience, most people like yourself tend to have an easier time than someone who went thru a bootcamp. But it is important to keep up with them and not wait until the last moment. (Put a annual reminder in your calendar of when your cycle starts)

This next part is self-serving. The exam writers, we are all volunteers and there are 100’s of us writing questions. I’ve alluded to the evolution of a question before and how it is shaped. It all starts in “incubator sessions”. This is kind of the first level and ISC2 typically will send out a very large invite net to CISSPs who are completing their first 3yr cycle AND keeping up with the CPE’s.

You can participate in one session every 2 years. However, the more sessions you do, and the more positive feedback you get from the ISC2 proctors; you will start to be invited to the more advanced sessions. All the way up to the hardest ones they offer, where there you will meet the most seasoned writers. People who are at the top of their proverbial game so to say. For some of us overachievers, we can sometimes do more than one session a year.

So! Why am I saying all that? Because you sound like a good candidate to take part in the sausage making process. I encourage all cert holders to do at least ONE session. It is how we get such a wide variety of questions being asked in different ways. Because that reflects real life. You are not always going to be exposed to people only speaking proper Queens English. (Unless of course it is one of mine or is reviewed by me; I am a grammar Nazi….. which is the only acceptable type of Nazi)

And that folks, ends my TED Talk. Brought to you by the letter E.

Source

https://www.reddit.com/r/cissp/s/ngFefosICx

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