I just received an email from ISACA letting me know that i passed! Alhamdulillah!

I was a little nervous because a few days before the exam i had suspected that i had been studying wrong. While i was taking the exam i had confirmed it.

I bought the practice tests.  My coworker brian told me that taking the questions over and over was the best tool for preparing (he later clarified that it wasn’t the only tool) for the exam. 

So that’s what i did.  ISACA has an adaptive testing utility that loads the exam questions with the area you perform the worst in.  Sounds great right?  So that’s what i did but i kept getting discouraged because i kept performing poorly.  The worse i performed in that area the more questions they sent me.

I did a little research on how other people prepared and someone suggested getting this book (I’ll get the title soon ). I read through that book,  making sure to go through the chapter questions both before and after i read the chapter. 

I still wasn’t where i needed to be.  So I started reading through the manual from ISACA that brian lent me. 

Then it dawned on me.  I had been spending waaay too much time on the area i was performing poorly in and not enough time in the other areas.  Problem was that the exam war just a few days away. 

So i went through and mapped out each domain.  I watched a video on passing the CISA. I prayed. 

Come exam time i was really disheartened to discover that the questions i had been going over the most were severely underrepresented. 

But i got my email today and i found out that i passed. 

Altogether i answered over 1600 questions on the practice exam.  When sorted from high to low,  there was a direct relationship between the amount of time i spent on a domain and how well i did.  I spent over 71 hours on the practice exam.

Two things i would do differently:
1. I would start studying earlier.
2. I would balance the practice tests between the adaptive test and the standard test.
(Edit: 3. i also would join a study group. Half the class were asian and they seemed to have more knowledge about the entire process than i did. Would love to have gotten in with them)

But all in all i think i did ok. Especially considering auditing is new for me. I hadnt even been an auditor for a year yet before i took the exam. I had been in IT for over 16 years before