Dear fellow members,
I am posting it a little late but hope someone might still find it useful.
I passed the OCAJP7 exam with 86% in Dec 2013. My version had 90 questions to be answered in 140 minutes and the passing score was 77%
Resources:
I followed Mala Gupta's "OCA
Java SE 7 Programmer I Certification Guide" book. I really loved this book and this was the perfect book for the exam.
I also used:-
http://www.tutorialspoint.com
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/
Java SE7 API
Questions:
In addition to the chapter end questions and a full-length Mock exam in the Mala Gupta book, I bought the official question set from Oracle (Kaplan) for the same exam. The question set was, certainly, useful but I thought it was a little expensive at $69. So, if you have cheaper options, then those might be better.
Exam Venue:
For the exam, itself, I took the exam at the Oracle's own
test centre/office in Delhi, India. It was a pleasant experience as everything was set-up already and had no issues. Compared to the Pearson VUE, the Oracle's official centres allow you to take a bottle of
water with you, which is good. The only downside of Oracle's own test centres is the dates. They had only 2 days per month or limited days when you could take the exam while at Person VUE you could take the exam any day (Mon-Sat), even on short notice.
Exam itself:
One of the things that I was worried about was running out of time. So, I was keeping an eye on the remaining time and, at every 10 questions, I would calculate a rough average of time I was taking to answer the questions making sure that I wasn't taking more than the average of 1.55 minutes per question.
In the end, actually, I had nearly 30 minutes to spare after finishing the exam. It might be a good idea to mark the questions for review if you are a little unsure about the answer. You may find a review useful if you have spare time left at the end of the exam.
Wish you all good luck!!