My CC Exam experience (passed)
I saw a reel on Instagram about a free certification, and my ears perked up on hearing free. So, I signed up for the CC certification, scheduled my exam, and started following the self paced module. I stumbled upon this subreddit the morning of the exam, and I read all the posts about the exam being extremely difficult and people failing. So I ended up at my test center with shaking hands, and even more freaked out in front of the computer. I did feel a little misled by both this subreddit and ISC2, so I'd like to share my experience and maybe put out some other people's anxieties.
On my pre-course assessment, I think got around 70%. I put off doing the rest of the assessment until 3 nights before my exam. Went through all the modules until I got "100% competency" in each, which surprisingly, you only need to cover about half the content in the module to achieve. That should have been the first red flag for me. I did the post-course assessment the night before the exam, got 85% and promptly fell asleep thinking I must be prepared.
As I mentioned above, I stumbled upon this subreddit the morning of the exam, looking for people's experiences and perhaps some sample papers. After reading a few posts, I skipped through a few YouTube videos and some notes shared in other posts.
The exam caught me off guard. A lot of questions had:
- terms I'd never seen before in the course
- questions with multiple possible right answers
- extremely vague wording
I would say the ONLY reason I passed is because I have what I learnt in both a Bachelor's and a Master's in Computer Science behind me. You cannot blindly trust the self-study course in your competency. If you really don't want to pay for the Udemy and other courses that are linked in other posts, please watch through some YouTube playlists about Computer Networking, Cloud Computing and Cryptography at a Bachelor's level at the minimum.
I'm not sure how they apply guess correction in the exam scores, but I was quite surprised that I actually ended up passing, considering another candidate failed right as I was signing in to the center.