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Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform
Success Stories
S.No 1. 2. 3. Author Mallige Flowers Andres Gonzalez Toby Davis Score 73% 85% 80% Date July 28, 2003 July 30, 2003 August 07, 2003
SCJP 1.4 Success Story by Mallige Flowers Hello All, I just took the SCJP1.4 exam and passed it this morning with 73%. Apologies for this long post, I hope it helps someone. Most important information are towards the later part of this post. Here is what I did: I studied rigorously for three weeks. I am basically a .Net person( yep!) and was curious about Java. In order to motivate myself to study java I registered for the exam four weeks ago. First week- - > bought KnB from amazon, goofed around doing nothing...exam was still very far away. Second week. -- > Book arrived. Book was huge, lots of topics to cover...studied each and every word in every chapter and thought I understood the concepts. By the end of this week, I had already forgotten some of the stuff I studied in the beginning. Took the self tests. Spent about 2- 3 hours studying every evening. Completed about 6 chapters. Third Week- - > Completed chap 7, 8, 9 and repeated from the beginning. except this time I made notes of important details in a small book. Result- - > better performance. Kept referring to my notes while travelling. Finished two rounds of the book only three days before the actual test date. I still had not taken any mock exams!! Panic sets in. I had scheduled my test for a monday so I had the entire weekend to spend on tests.(pat myself on my back) During the weekend: Mock Exams : 1. Two exams from KnB --- > Didn't do too well 2. Two Marcus Green's mock test -- > got 70% and 72% 3. Read through fives pages of the SCJP certification thread on this site-Javaranch.
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4. Took some cattle round up tests Late night on Sunday I went thorugh Dan Chisolm's tests. ---> got 68% Mental state : I really hope I pass, although there are not much chances of it. Terrible Head ache. D- Day: They say test takers usually underestimate themsel es. I was positive about v failing. At the end of it all, I thought I had answered only 5 questions correctly. Result --> 73%. About the Test: 1.Lots of questions on Innerclasses, Garbage collection, Assertions, Threads. 2.Definitely go through Dan's tests and read his explanations. I wish I had done this earlier than the day before the test. The test was most similar to his tests. 3.KnB is the only book I needed. 4.Take Marcus's test --Strangely enough the percentage I got in his tests was very close to what I got on the real test, although the questions were more like those on Dan's.
Oh by the way I got 100% on five areas :-). Did hopelessly in Threads. If you have reached this far in the post, congrats you definitely have a chance at passing. Mallige Flowers greenhorn Member # 53797 posted July 28, 2003 06:33 PM Topic: SCJP 1.4 Passed - My experience
SCJP Success Story by Andres Gonzalez Hello All, Boys and girls, 10 minutes ago I passed my SCJP exam with a score of 85%. Actually I'm a bit disappointed with the score, was aiming at more than 90%, but it's ok, now I'm joining the club!! Garbage collection and Collections framework killed me (66% each). Pay attention to them. Threads was also pretty weak (75%). Got a few 100%'s. For those of you studying here's my preparation: - Started reading KnB book and everytime I finished a chapter I started with the chapter test. I wasn't doing well in those, scoring an average of 40- 50%. As soon as I finished that, I jumped straight into Dan's topic exams. Yes, they are harder, yes, sometimes they're out of the exam scope, but THEY ARE THE BEST.
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As you can imagine the frustration was even bigger. I was getting avg 40% in the mock exams. - Finished KnB and re- read it again, focusing more on Dan's tests. I did a LOT of questions on that. - Bought JQPlus. I figured that it's better to spend 25 dollars than paying again for the certification exam if you fail . Did all 11-full-60- questions mock exams. It does help you, specially when checking the time. When I went to the exam I knew my first pass through all the questions should not take me more than 30 minutes, based on JQplus "strategy". - My average score in JQPlus was 75%. Day before yesterday I did the 11th test, I was really tired of doing mock exams, I did a lot (that's the reason I'm not quite happy with the results). I did it so fast that when I finished I still had 1h:15 minutes left. Score 70% in that one - Three weeks ago I started doing Marcus Green Tests (skipping the 1.2 questions). Got 81, 88, 83, 85. So it is really close to the real exam. - Did also KnB master exam (scoring 88 and 81%) so, basically, JQPlus, marcus green, and dan's, and of course, an excellent book like KnB. This is basically it. Pay a lot of attention to the code, the exam is not that hard to pass, passing score of 52 and 120 minutes is more than enough to pass it, of course, if you've studied. Pay attent ion to threads, GC and collections. You'll find many questions like "which collection class/interface would you use if blah, blah,blah". Also, read the questions carefully. There were many like "if thread A notifies blah blah". THe options are very similar, basically the same sentences but with words like "only, always, etc", which makes a lot of a difference. I know I missed a lot of those ones because of that. Also, if you see a lot of calculations, check the answers, if you see there's no compilation error option (nor even runtime error), then jump straight into that, you can assume that the code compiles and runs. Otherwise check names, like public void break(int x) { // some code } Can you spot the error? (This was NOT in the exam, it's taken from KnB book, it's only to show an example) Mock exams is the way to go.. take enough time to do excercise, and play with the code as well. Another thing very very useful: Answer questions in the forum. You don't know
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how much it helps. You always see the same people answering questions, but it is an excellent way to prove that you know what "you're talking about". That's it. And of course, many thanks to Dan Chisholm. Man, thanks for such an effort to putting up a site like that. Also to anupam, alton, jose botella, thomas paul, damien, marlene and her excellent answers and all of you guys around. And of course to Kathy and Bert (or Bert and Kathy) for the book, excellent!!! Chao! Andres ranch hand Member # 23167 posted posted July 30, 2003 08:58 PM Topic: Hasta la vista, SCJP.. Passed!!!!!! some tips
SCJP 1.4 Success Story by Toby Davis Hello All, Passed the 1.4 exam, scored 80%. Like most everyone else, my lowest section scores were Threads and GC (66% each). Inversely I did very well on Flow Control/Assertions/Exception Handling, java.lang classes, Language Fundamentals, and Overloading/Overriding/Runtime/OO. Remaining sections were average to above- average (75- 80%). Background: - programmed Java since '97 (off and on), with bulk of my Java experience in web apps (J2EE) realm - spent most of the past year doing C# instead of Java - decided cert was best way to get back into Java after being in .NET land Preparation: I used only the K&B book, and took both CD mock exams (88% and 86% each), as well as 4 of Dan Chisolm's exams (didn't score myself on those). Total of a week of hard studying. (Also attended a local JUG's weekly exam -preparation session this past spring, but missed half the sessions and never really studied hard then due to work conflicts). Comments (for my version of the exam): - the real exam was a bit tougher than the K&B exams, and a bit easier than Dan Chisolm's - format and similiarity of questions definitely close to K&B - a good 25% of the exam covered GC and Threads (our favorite subjects) - very little emphasis on bit shifting (i recall maybe one question on it, though
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that may not be the case for others) - even mix of code- based and "sentence"-based questions EXCEPT in Collections (I don't recall seeing one code- based ? on it - again, may be different for others) The rest had a good mix of topics, though it had more emphasis on Threads than K&B mock exams did. Oh - and, no, there will not be subject headers for each question, like the LearnKey K&B has. Anyway, that's all I can think of right now short of giving up actual questions Toby Davis ranch hand Member # 28639 posted posted August 07, 2003 12:53 PM