ISSMP Practice Questions (Free Sample)

125 questions in three hours, delivered at Pearson VUE. That is roughly eighty seconds an item, which sounds generous until you meet the scenario stems — several run to a full paragraph of organizational context before the question arrives. Confirm current logistics at isc2.org when you book, since ISC2 sets the format and may change it.

700 out of 1000 on ISC2’s scaled scoring. That is not a raw 70%: scaled scores account for the difficulty of the specific items you were served, so the number of questions you need right is not fixed and cannot be read off the scale. The Certifym practice pass mark is set at 70% as an honest raw-score equivalent, and because every set is weighted to the official domain percentages, clearing it means genuine coverage across all six domains rather than luck in the heavy ones.

Leadership and Organizational Management is the heaviest at 21%, and Risk Management sits close behind at 20% — together two-fifths of the exam, and the two domains whose framing decides the right answer in questions nominally about something else. Security Operations follows at 18%, then Systems Lifecycle Management at 15% and Law, Ethics, and Security Compliance Management at 14%. Contingency Management is lightest at 12%, but it is the most formulaic domain on the exam — BIA-driven recovery strategy, RTO and RPO, the test-type ladder — so it is the cheapest place to buy points and the last one worth skipping.

ISC2 restructured the domains around what security management actually looks like now, and embedded AI governance throughout rather than parking it in one place. The classic material is all still there — policy frameworks, KPIs and KRIs, budget cases, risk treatment and cost-benefit analysis, supply chain risk, SOC and incident program governance, BIA-driven contingency planning, audit coordination. What sits alongside it is new: shadow AI policy and ethical AI governance models in Leadership, the NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 in Risk Management, MLSecOps decision gates in Systems Lifecycle, prompt injection and data poisoning response in Security Operations, model artifacts and retraining time in Contingency, and the EU AI Act in Law and Compliance.

Where the CISSP proves breadth across the profession, the ISSMP proves you can lead it — aligning the security program with the organization’s mission, making risk decisions defensible, and translating threats into the language of business impact. It began as a CISSP concentration and is now a standalone advanced certification, one of the three highest-bar credentials ISC2 offers. In practice that means the two exams reward different reflexes: CISSP asks what a security professional should advise, ISSMP asks what a security manager should authorize, fund, escalate, or accept.

You need to be able to govern it, not build it. The 2025 outline expects you to reason about shadow AI policy and ethical AI governance models, apply the NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001, treat model weights as crown-jewel assets and MLSecOps gates as change control, bring ML engineers into incident response for prompt injection and data poisoning, count model artifacts and retraining time as continuity dependencies, and place a system inside the EU AI Act’s risk tiers. Every one of those is a management decision about AI, expressed in the vocabulary the rest of the exam already uses.

The sample is a fixed 15-question set spread across the six domains at outline proportions, with no account needed. Members get ten full-length ISSMP practice exams with full explanations, study mode, and domain drills; each full-length attempt is 125 original questions against a three-hour timer, weighted to the official domain percentages. New practice content is added every week and your progress is saved when you join. None of the member-bank items appear in this sample.

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