About Evelyn
Dr. Evelyn (Eva) Schneider is a Principal Cybersecurity Researcher holding a PhD in Computer Science, where her dissertation focused on adversarial machine learning. Over a 15-year career she has led security operations teams at Fortune 100 financial firms and built SOC programs from the ground up. Today Eva's research focuses on the cognitive science behind how IT professionals actually retain technical knowledge, and why the traditional video-course model fails so many certification candidates. She writes about what the data actually says about passing certification exams.
CybersecurityCISSPExam PreparationSecurity Operations
Articles by Evelyn
Study Strategy
Why You're Failing IT Certification Exams (And It's Not Because You Didn't Study Enough)
The average first-attempt pass rate for CISSP is around 50%. The problem isn't effort, it's how you studied.
April 4, 2026 14 min read