During my CISSP preparation, I worked through nearly 6,000 practice questions.
With that many questions, getting some of them wrong is inevitable.
But somewhere along the way, I started looking at those wrong answers differently.
Initially, a wrong answer simply felt like a mistake.
You see the correct answer and think, “Okay, I got that one wrong.”
Then you move on.
But after doing this repeatedly, I realised I was missing an opportunity.
The important part wasn’t that I got the question wrong.
The important part was why I got it wrong.
That question started becoming more useful to me than the score itself.
Sometimes it was a genuine knowledge gap.
I simply didn’t know the concept well enough.
Those were relatively straightforward. Go back, understand it properly, and move on.
But many mistakes weren’t knowledge gaps at all.
Sometimes I had read the question too quickly.
Sometimes I had missed a small but important part of the scenario.
Sometimes I had selected an answer because it sounded technically right.
Sometimes my professional experience had pushed me toward an answer that made sense in the real world, but didn’t fit the question.
And sometimes I had simply overthought the whole thing.
I began noticing that my wrong answers were showing me how I think under pressure.
That was much more interesting.
Instead of just maintaining a record of how many questions I got right, I started paying attention to the pattern behind my mistakes.
If I repeatedly made the same type of mistake, that was something I needed to work on.
If I kept selecting a technically attractive answer when another answer better addressed the scenario, I needed to understand why.
If I was consistently missing words such as first, best, most appropriate or least, I needed to become more careful with how I read the question.
Slowly, the practice questions became less about getting a high percentage and more about learning from the questions that exposed my weaknesses.
That changed the way I practised.
I didn’t want to remember:
Question 127 — Answer C.
That wouldn’t help me much if the actual exam gave me a completely different scenario.
I wanted to remember:
Why did I choose C?
And more importantly:
Why was C wrong?
That distinction made my preparation much more meaningful.
There were times when I got a question right but wasn’t particularly confident about why.
Those questions also caught my attention.
Because getting the right answer for the wrong reason isn’t necessarily a sign that the concept is understood.
It could simply be a lucky choice.
So I started looking at both sides.
Wrong answer with good reasoning?
Understand where the reasoning went off track.
Right answer with weak reasoning?
Understand the concept properly.
That process gradually built something more useful than a practice-test score.
It built confidence in my reasoning.
And I think that helped me when I eventually sat for the actual exam.
As I mentioned in the earlier parts of this series, the first 30 questions were tough for me.
They didn’t feel like the questions I had practised.
I had walked into the exam confident after working through thousands of questions, and within those first 30, I started questioning whether I was prepared at all.
It took me around 50 minutes to get through those 30 questions.
That could easily have become a problem.
But by then, I had experienced enough difficult questions during preparation to know that feeling uncomfortable didn’t necessarily mean I was getting everything wrong.
I had learned to look at the question, understand what I had missed, reset and move on.
That helped me regain my rhythm.
The next 70 questions took around 60 minutes.
Looking back, I think my preparation wasn’t valuable simply because I had answered thousands of questions.
It was valuable because thousands of questions gave me thousands of opportunities to understand my own mistakes.
That’s something I would probably emphasise to anyone preparing for CISSP.
Don’t become obsessed with the percentage.
A 90 percent score can make you feel good.
A 60 percent score can make you feel terrible.
But neither number tells the complete story.
What matters is what happens after you get the question wrong.
Do you just look at the correct answer?
Or do you understand why you selected the wrong one?
Because a correct answer tells you that you got that question right.
A wrong answer can tell you something much deeper.
It can reveal a knowledge gap.
A reading problem.
An assumption.
A technical bias.
A tendency to overthink.
Or simply a decision-making pattern that needs work.
For me, those mistakes became a kind of mirror.
The more I paid attention to them, the better I understood where I needed to improve.
And that is probably why I no longer look at practice questions simply as a way of measuring preparation.
For me, they became a way of building the thinking required for the actual exam.
The 6,000 questions didn’t prepare me by giving me 6,000 answers.
They prepared me by giving me 6,000 chances to think, make mistakes, correct myself and try again.
And perhaps that’s the part of my CISSP preparation I value the most.
The questions I got right gave me confidence.
The questions I got wrong gave me understanding.
And I needed both.
