Hi,
I cleared
SCJP with 93% !!!. I got 55/59. I consider this as a great achievement for myself, with a job and a SON WHO IS IN HIS TERRIBLE TWO !. I have no previous experience in
java, and practically zero experience in OOPs, but of course I have 6 yrs of programming experience. I started studying for certification by Sept beginning with the book Thinking in java by Bruce Eckel. I could hardly put 2 hrs per day for my studies in Sept. In the last 5-6 weeks I would have put average 2 and half hours and that is it !!. All these wouldn't have been possible without my husband's co-operation. So half the credit goes to him.
I used following resources for the prep. Bruce Eckel's Thinking in java, the famous RHE and Exam Cram, javaranch site, maha anna's all 40 mock exams and JLS whenever I get confused with the concepts and some amount of practice with writting code.
I feel this is more than enough if you use it effectively.
I wouldn't say the exam was easy, it was average difficult considering the effort I put. But there were a few ambiguous questions, and I feel that is were I lost. I would say that getting a passing score or upto 70% is easy. But after that you need lot of effort for every 1%. I concentrated too much on
thread, because all the discussions scared me, but I got 100% in thread. You can expect 5-6 questions in thread but 2-3 will be with code which needs real clear concepts.
I would say with the new exam format, we are fortunate that sun has decided to specify the number of correct choices in each questions. You save lot of time and that justifies SUN's decision of reducing the time by 30 minutes. The questions are tricky, so with the correct number of choices specified, you can use the method of elimination very effectively. I used that in lot of questions.
One thing is, you have to keep yourself cool. I got tensed in the beginning and around 35-40th questions (this is where the thread questions come) looking at the time ticker. I went totally blank for 2-3 minutes. I had only 15 minutes to review. During review I changed 2 answers, one got wrong , the other was right.
All the best to all of you. My sincere thanks to Javaranch site and its moderators. This is a good site for learning. I have been a silent watcher to this site, but wasn't very active because I wasn't sure whether I'm in a stage where I can clear other's doubts. Now, I feel, I can clear some basic doubts but ofcourse I have long way to go !!!.
One more thing, none of the code was more than 15 lines and maximum 12-15 questions with 10-15 lines. All others are either theory or 4-5 lines of code.
Thanks for reading this long mail !.
Jaya.
