Passed at 100Q · CISSP Study Group

Passed at 100Q

Passed today at 100q with about 25 mins left. Thank you to everyone for the advice and resources you've shared. The exam was not exactly easy but also not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I felt I was doing okay through most of it. There were a handful of questions that I truly didn't know from the CBK. And a handful that were very difficult, but mostly it was applying analytical thinking to the scenarios. One approach that really helped me is to ask myself what the end game is. What is the true outcome the question is asking for. Framing it that way helped me answer a lot of questions correctly.

Here are the resources I used and my study journey:

I started about a year ago reading the OSG but found it too dense and boring. I then moved onto the Destination Cert guide, which I highly recommend.

After completing the Dest Cert I started with the official Wiley test questions but those were too literal and technical. Then I started with QE. I also later bought the Boson exams (good but slightly too technical) and joined the CISSP Study Group on skool.com. I started doing learning sessions through that group which I found really helpful and motivating. A big shout out to everyone who participated.

I also started using https://cissp.app which has an excellent question base.

One more test bank I want to mention is really excellent, especially when prepping close to the exam are the questions at the end of Andrew Ramdayal's Udemy course: https://www.udemy.com/course/cisspcertification/?couponCode=MT260928G1A

The first set, 50 hard questions, are free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbVY0Cg8Ntw

Many of you will already know of them.

But it was totally worth getting the additional 100 exam questions which accompany his course. In my opinion these were the closest to the actual exam.

(I probably used too many test banks and know that others won't choose that path. But I found that each test bank seems to gravitate towards its own favourite topics so overall it was very helpful to train on a number of them. But everyone is different and some people have passed just using one or two test banks.)

In retrospect I wish I'd discovered Peter Zerger's video earlier. Anyway, his 100 Exam Prep Topics video is priceless (actually he covers 120 topics). I ran through this two weekends before the exam and it was perfectly calibrated to cover all the important things that are on the exam. However, it is not a shortcut. You need to have studied the material before using this video.

I then spent the next two weeks going over everything that I was weak on, largely based on the Zerger video. I used Claude heavily to drill topics and also to help with getting the mindset thinking in place. Claude would often go off on weird tangents and I'd have to "tune" it to get back on track.

In the days before the exam I started getting fatigued and backtracking. I had to force myself to do less. In the 24 hours before the exam I did very little. I just let my brain rest. The main stuff I did was light revision and watching mindset videos. The rest is described above.

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Passed at 100Q