I am a CISA

After a long and nail-biting wait for the results of the CISA exam, I am relieved to know that I have passed the exam successfully. It had been some very difficult months for me leading up to the exams. You see I was back in India at the I registered for the exam and I had registered for it in Washington DC in anticipation of my assignment in the US starting sometime February this year. The trip was getting delayed for some reason or the other and I was in self doubt as to whether to postpone this or cancel it or change the location. But finally I stuck to the initial plan of taking it in US and I came here. I had not purchased any review manual from ISACA and was relying on the CISA Prep guide by Richard Kramer from Wiley books. The reviews of the books were not very encouraging, but I being short on cash, still went for that and studied using that book. Then there were the re-location pains from India to US and the fact the client manager was demanding more and more from me. Add to it a 7 month old son who traveled half the globe for me and I had to set up house for my family and everything. I finally got around to some serious study by May 15th and finished reading the book just once 3 days before the exams.

Then I took some sample tests from the Boson Simulator software and attempted almost 500 questions. But the results were far from satisfactory. I could manage a best score of 60% correct answers in all the tests I took. I was so very down in dumps. But my wife managed to egg me up quite nicely and gave me the confidence I needed to tackle the exam. I finally took the exam and I guess, very soon I will get a certificate that will look like this:

Looking back at my experiences, I think this was the most planned and the best test I ever took. I had planned to be a CISA back in April - May 2004 and had found out that the exam is held only once (now twice) and registration has to be done sometime before February. I saved some money, registered and took the test and passed. I think now I can rest on my laurels for some time.

But just for a little while.