How Nawaris Cracked His CISSP Exam

Hi Everyone!

I passed the CISSP exam yesterday! I would like to give you my PERSONAL advice and important NOTES to keep in mind to help you pass the exam!

First, You should be proud of yourself that you are preparing and challenging yourself with the CISSP exam!

PRACTICING is your WEAPON to win the war, would military leaders go to war without enough training?

Plan to have at least the last couple weeks before the exam just for practicing, the more different questions you face during practice, the stronger you become in the test center. The less experience you have in a domain the more questions you should practice!

If you ARE NOT scoring 90% or higher on your practice questions Please reschedule the exam, it will worth the $50 reschedule fee and not losing the total $600 exam cost to repay again besides being ready and feeling more confident!

You should practice sitting the exam at home with a timer for at least three hours without a break!

Practice TIME MANAGEMENT skills especially if you are not native English speaker! The English wording for some of the questions is very confusing but written for a purpose.

Practice questions randomly all over the domains to stress your brain and strengthen your information retrieval process! In the exam every time you click next question it will take you to a completely different domain and topic so keep that in mind.

When you practice try to answer each question within 60 seconds at the most, if you can not then MARK THE QUESTION and click next, you will still have too many other questions to finish and by this technique you will have enough time to go back and recheck your answers but NEVER LEAVE a question unanswered before you click next!

Make sure you understand the concepts, fundamentals, and theory when you prepare for the exam and do not worry about deep technical details (CISSP exam scope is a high level) it is not a Cisco CCNA or Comptia network plus exam.

SYBEX Book is a great resource but the questions are easy so make sure you practice other resources. Shon Harris book is excellent for lacking experience professionals; The CBK book is the closest to the real exam language context.

Remember you are a consultant or a senior manager hired by a BIG Corporate for 6 hours to provide consultation answering all their questions.

Look for the big words in the answers provided such as EVALUATE and

REVIEW and the most important is DOCUMENT/DOCUMENTATION.

Stay away from the pure technical answers such as plug in a cable or turning off a machine. (You are a consultant not touching the customer equipment. (You tell them what should be done)

You should be comfortable picking the right answer based on the BEST, LEAST, MOST, GREATEST, etc. judgments. Lets say you have eliminated two wrong answers and the other two are both correct but you still need to pick the best answer according to the scenario, for instance the last two options one with SSL and the other with TLS you should pick TLS because it is more secure or you have WPA and WPA2 and you pick WPA2 over WPA if stronger needed in the question or the opposite if they are asking the less secure.

You should be VERY COMFORTABLE with the types of attacks, surprisingly too many questions about attacks.

EMPLOYEES, PEOPLE, WORKFORCE, HUMAN LIFE is the most important thing than all the assets in an organization. Maybe you disagree but remember the exam questions emphasis on PERFECT life scenarios not necessarily applicable.

Practice the elimination technique; it will help you choose correct answer faster, sometimes the correct answer for some question is correct just because the other ones are wrong so if you see incomplete or unclear answer do not instantly skip it, it could be the right answer just because the other ones were eliminated. I used this technique and it worked and I passed!

When you face very similar sentences, read the whole thing, the keyword could be the last word in the statement. If one part of the statement is wrong then just eliminate the whole statement and narrow down your choices.

When you see the word POLICY, it is most likely the correct answer, keep it as one of the last options you have left!

Thank you Luke Ahmed for this great study group and I wish every one of you all success and happiness and to achieve your dream and become CISSP certified