CISSP Tips and Tricks | How to find your study materials – Practice questions

In this lecture, we’re going to talk about practice questions, and this is not how to approach them.
This is simply finding the right ones.
I will, however, now say it is important to to them right.
Don’t just take a practice test, say, oh, I got 70% right.
And then move on.
Every question where you’re not completely sure on the answer mark it for review, and then at the end of each test, take all the questions you had marked for review and all the questions you got wrong and restudy all those topics.
That is really where the practice test makes sense.
If you just look at them quickly and say, oh, right, that’s this.
And oh, I guess I should study that, then you’re really learning nothing new.
You need to go from whatever you got.
Right.
Let’s say 70% and then you want to go to 80 or 85 and you get to that point by studying everything that you had wrong, everything that you had marked for review until a point where you can explain the concept and you are very clear on why you got that question wrong.
And also a little caution here, I don’t really suggest reusing practice questions at all because sure, you got 70% the first time you took them and you got 80% the second time.
It’s very likely you scored higher because you remember some of the answers, what they were.
That teaches you nothing, that teaches you to memorize an answer that will not help you anywhere.
Now back to the slide.
As you can see here, I have them separated into easy to mid and hard.
And normally a student needs somewhere between three and 5000 questions.
I suggest about 1500 of those are hard.
And the way you should use the questions, the easy mid hard is to start out with the easy to mid level ones, because early on, when you’re doing practice tests, you really need to find the big gaps, the things that are really big, that you need to go and restudy.
And there are only a limited amount of hard questions.
And you want to use those when you get to the end of your studying the last month, month and a half maybe two, where you’re just fine tuning things.
So start out with the easy to mid finish off with the hard ones.
So let’s start out with the ones that are easy to mid.
And here you can recognize again, AIO and Cybex, same publishers we talked about when we talked about the primary book.
If I were studying, I would probably get both.
They’re both reasonably inexpensive and they have a good chunk of questions.
I think about a thousand.
Then I have my own easy to mid questions.
You can either get those on Udemy at thorteaches.com/udemy or if you want to buy everything in a bundle, just thorteaches.com/cissp.
And then for questions as well, I have other notable mentions.
Here, CCCURE by Clement Dupuis.
I personally really like his questions when I did my CISSP, but I have been hearing from students that there are a lot of security plus questions in his question pool.
So if you buy those, just be aware of that, that some of them might not have the exact right point of view.
I’ve also had a good number of students say Pocketprep is awesome.
Most students seem to like it because it has a phone app.
So in the App Store or the Google Play store, you can get the app and use it on the go.
Then we have IT Dojo, and IT Dojo is a YouTube channel where Colin Weaver walks through CISSP questions.
I think there are over a hundred questions by now and I think he does a couple of questions in each video.
I think for some students it can be a great way to learn how to logic your way through a question.
And then finally in the mid to easy questions, we have the questions of the day, in my Facebook group, Facebook.com/groups/thorteaches, I post free practice questions.
Wentz Wu does the same in his Effective CISSP Facebook group.
And finally, Adam Gordon on his LinkedIn profile, he also posts free daily CISSP questions.
Awesome, right?
Free CISSP questions.
And now that we covered the easy to mid, let’s look at the hard questions and use these towards the end of your studying the last month, maybe two.
At this point, you’re probably scoring 75 to 85% on the easy ones.
But remember, these are hard questions.
Don’t get deflated if all of a sudden on these you score 60 or 65%.
That’s not the point at all.
While the percentage score is a nice indicator, really what questions are for is to find the areas that you are weak in and improve them.
Since these ask more convoluted, harder questions, of course, you’re going to score lower initially, just like with the easy questions, here, after each test, everything you have marked for review and everything you got wrong, you restudy.
And that part is even more important here because now we’re fine tuning the knowledge and.
With that rant done, let’s look at the actual question banks.
First off, I have my own hard questions.
You can get those on thorteaches.com.
And what I have tried to do with those is really emulate the exam.
So there will be little keywords or indicators that can change, which answer option is the right one.
And I’ve also tried to make the answer options more difficult, more in depth, very similar, some of them, but with distinct differences, because that is what you are going to see on the exam.
And remember, there is no questions that are like the exam, none, but some of them are closer than others.
The hard questions are the ones that are closest.
And there really are a few reasons why no question banks are like the exam.
Supposedly the question banks for the exam has more than 10000 questions.
That means that you can take the CISSP exam 50 times and never see a single question repeating.
Or five people can take the CISSP exam and if they remember all the questions and they talk about it after they realized that none of them got any of the same questions.
The BOSON CISSP questions are the ones that most students who pass the exam say that help them the most.
Tricky, convoluted, difficult enough to emulate the exam while maybe being slightly more technical.
And you can get those on boson.thorteaches.com and as the last set of the hard questions, again, Luke Ahmed’s Study Notes and Theory and he has, I think, about 600 hard questions.
All his questions are only hard here.
Also, I think they tend to lean slightly more technical and they are harder that at least Boson and I think the Thorteaches questions as well and possibly even harder than the exam, which is not a bad thing.
I think it can possibly even prepare you better.
So to finish this out, remember, use the easy questions first, the hard questions towards the end, get three – five thousand questions somewhere in that range and I should just be getting at least 1500 hard ones.
That means getting at least two out of the three I have listed here as hard questions and with that we are done with this lecture.
I will see you in the next one.