So, tomorrow I will sit the ISACA CISA exam.
I’m feeling fairly well prepared .. I had a fair bit of time to study leading up to the exam. Here’s a few things I noted while getting ready for the exam.
1. Don’t bother with testkings or braindump or any of those sites. I spent a few hundred dollars on sims/practice exams .. all pretty well worthless in my eyes.
2. Only use the ISACA CISA review manual .. they’re the ones writing the questions from THEIR manual .. all the answers are in there
3. Make sure you actually have some working experience for this exam. Although your job may not cover all of the subject areas, you are likely to have touched on a few, and that makes life a lot easier
4. The exam was written with the company in mind. A lot of things boil back to “what’s best for the company”
5. Try and get along to some review courses before the exam date. this year there were none in my area .. but luckily SANS put on a free 3hr review session (it was good too)
So today has been a day of very light review, it was time to relax. What I don’t know now .. well .. I probably won’t remember anyway! I’ll have a nice dinner tonight, watch a bit of TV, and then head off to bed nice and early.
Hopefully in 6-8 weeks you’ll be seeing a post here saying that I’ve passed
Good luck to anyone else sitting their exam tomorrow
** UPDATE **
I just thought I’d add a little more information in here (just to keep in the back of your mind). The exam weightings .. you should have probably taken note of those before now (if you haven’t .. I’m sure you’ll be fine) are as follows
- Ch1 – IS Audit Process – 10%
- Ch2 – IT Governance – 15%
- Ch3 – Systems and Inf Life Cycle Management – 16%
- Ch4 – IT Service Delivery – 14%
- Ch5 – Protection of Info Assets – 31%
- Ch6 – BCP & DR – 14%
So, Chapter 5 is the big one – Protection of Information Assets. If you have a working technical knowledge, most of this stuff you will know, If you’re a Financial auditor wanting to get your CISA, this could be a bit more of a challenge. The other dark horse here is Chapter 3, it’s a big section of the book that not a lot of places do (or at least do it well) .. keep that one in your mind
Now everyone relax, take some time out .. and make sure you’re ready for tomorrow. Make sure you know where you’re going and how to get there (don’t get caught in traffic – give yourselves plenty of time to travel). Have a nice breakfast, nothing too big that will put you to sleep, take a light jacket to keep yourself warm (in case the air con is a bit cold), take some water and some snacks (and not the annoying loud one in wrappers – damn you guy from my CISM exam!!).
