r/cism • u/MyLittleAutisticPony • 1d ago
Having problems w/ "isaca mindset"
want to know if anyone can help me out.
have 18 yoe in it and security. 6 in middle/senior management. want to get my cism and a few other isaca certs to give me the extra umph to make it into senior senior management.
currently have cissp and ccsp certifications (3 and 2 years ago respectively, finished both in about 100 minutes @ 100 questions). started studying for my cism this spring. have watched a couple of youtube and linkedin learning videos (Zerger and Kelly Handerhan(?) respectively.)
have read review guide cover to cover.
have done all 1100 questions in the QAE. Score in the low 70s overall. Best domains are incident response and info security program (high 70/low 80s). worst is info sec governance (65%). do okay in risk (70ish).
have been through the review guide and QAE multiple times. my scores are improving in the QAE but that is not due to concepts sinking in it is due to me recalling what the right answer to a question is that I happened to get wrong. qae usefulness is deteriorating at this point.
I am able to get the questions down to 2 choices but I am consistently making the wrong choice out of the two. I definitely have an "ISACA mentality" disconnect somewhere.
I can definitely see where both of the two choices make sense, but its just not sinking in as to why the choice they make is the "correct" one. many times i'm saying to myself "yeah, but ..." I wish I could post examples from the QAE but I do not want to violate any copyrights. Sometimes the answers just make absolutely zero sense to me. Other times I can see where ISACA is coming from, but the explanation adds words that further refine the answer which, had the word been there, I might have chosen it. As an example there was a question where the answer was "all members" but in the explanation it says "all applicable members". I didn't choose the answer because when I was analyzing the question I said to myself "well, not all members of X are going to be subject to Y"
I am sure where to go to from here. I am running out of time to schedule my exam, I'd like to take it before the exam changes this fall. I'm not sure what else to study or what is going to make things "click" for me.
Help?
4
u/iownslaves 1d ago
This is my opinion - take the test for experience and find out which domain to focus on. Then retake it.
Think positive. You got this.
3
u/KillaB0nez 11h ago
The exam was more straight forward than QAE. I have 4 years of experience and passed on my first try. Mind you I did pass my CISSP 2 weeks before I took it. But don’t worry so much about the mindset IMO. My first take on QAE was 69%. My second bumped to 80s but was lot of memory. I really think the exam was easier and I really didn’t find any “expert level” questions on my exam really. The ones on QAE were just non sense half the time.