TL;DR
- Take a practice exam before you study anything else, and use the score report as your study plan.
- Quiz yourself instead of rereading notes by building flashcards around the weak spots your practice exam turns up.
- Study in short sessions spread over several days, not one long cram session.
- Schedule the exam for the time of day you’re sharpest, and plan your caffeine and meals around it.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Most of the advice you’ll see this month is for everyone else: spot the phish, turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA), use a password manager, and keep your software updated. The tips below are for those who give that advice.
If you want to pass a security cert before the end of the year, Rusty Newton has an approach that could cut your study time a lot. Rusty is a Principal Security Solutions Engineer at Expel. He’s been a field tech, a consultant, a CISO, and an account executive, and he’s earned more than 20 industry certifications along the way.
He’s also obsessed with how people learn, though he’s quick to call himself an enthusiast, not a learning scientist. Here’s what he shared on our Nerdy 30 livestream.
1. Start with the practice exam
Most people save the practice exam for the end, as a dress rehearsal. Rusty takes it on day one.
“A lot of people see a practice exam, they think, I’m going to use this for practice, but that’s not the way to use it. It’s much more effective if you use it as a diagnostic to find your gaps and to find your weak points.”
Start by pulling up the exam objectives. Search “CISSP exam objectives” or “Security+ exam objectives” and you’ll find a list of exactly what’s tested and how much each domain is weighted. Then take a practice exam and read the score report. That report is your study plan.
This matters most if you already have some experience. Before you sign up for a 45-hour video course, take the practice exam first. “You may only need to do 10 hours,” Rusty says.
And keep testing as you go. Take another practice exam a week or two in and track your progress—if your score drops, that’s useful information too. The random question pool probably hit your weak spots, and now you know what to study next.
2. Quiz yourself on what you missed
According to Rusty, research has shown over and over that taking notes and rereading them is one of the least effective ways to learn, because rereading only exposes you to the material again.
“Exposure is not what does the work in the mind and in our brain…you need to work with the information.”
What works is recall practice: answering a prompt from memory, like a quiz question. Space that practice out over days instead of cramming and you get spaced recall. It helps flatten what psychologists call the forgetting curve, which Hermann Ebbinghaus first mapped in the 1800s.
Rusty’s study tool of choice is Anki, a free, open-source flash card app. It uses an algorithm to show you each card (right before you’re likely to forget it). His method:
- Turn what you study into questions instead of notes.
- Build your deck around the weak spots your practice exam found.
- Review cards in two- or three-minute bursts throughout the day.
- Add visuals to your cards (called dual coding).
- Alternate between related topics, like firewalls and networking, so you start connecting them (called interleaving).
By exam day, your deck is a custom mini exam built from your own weak points.
If you want to go deeper on these techniques, Rusty recommends learningscientists.org, which is run by a group of cognitive psychologists who aren’t selling anything (seriously).
3. Study in small chunks
You don’t need to clear a whole Saturday. Rusty says that if you break a five-hour study session into one hour a day over five days, you’ll “retain significantly more.”
A typical week for him is an hour or two of study on Sunday, card reviews in spare minutes on Monday and Tuesday, then another study block a few days later.
Keep the sessions active. Whiteboard concepts, draw diagrams, explain the topic out loud, or call a friend who knows the subject. And get enough sleep, which Rusty knows is critical for both attention and memory.
4. Use AI as a study partner
Rusty uses ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to look at a topic from different angles. He’ll ask for a metaphor that explains network address translation, or a handful of mnemonics for a list he has to memorize (but don’t forget to fact-check what it gives you).
5. Plan exam day like you planned the studying
Most people pick an exam time that’s convenient. Pick the time when you’re sharpest instead.
“Don’t take an exam at 9pm at night, if that’s when you’re sleepiest.” A friend of Rusty’s failed an exam three times, taking it late at night every time. He finally took it on a Saturday morning, after his coffee, and passed with flying colors.
A few more things Rusty does before an exam:
- Times his caffeine.
- Skips heavy meals. Skipping breakfast works for him, so experiment and find what works for you.
- Does 10–15 minutes of exercise, then rests for a bit.
- Runs a quick cram session on his Anki deck to refresh his weak spots.
If you need an emergency pick-me-up, try what Rusty calls a “nappuccino.” Drink a cup of coffee, then close your eyes for 15–20 minutes without fully falling asleep. The caffeine kicks in right as your timer goes off.
Then walk in with confidence. If you’ve been scoring high on practice exams and your own deck, you already know you’ve covered your weak spots.
You can watch Rusty’s full Nerdy 30 interview here.
