Hi all,
I've just taken and passed
SCJP. I've been dropping by JavaRanch all through my study and I'd like to say a big thank you to all the ranch hands, bartenders, greenhorns, cowgirls, and mock exam authors. Your help was invaluable.
I mostly studied for the exam on trains(!) and haven't had much time to post in the forum, but in an effort to redress the balance I have some advice that I hope other people will find useful.
1. The Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates book is outstanding! It covers everything you need to know for the exam and the sample questions are very close to the real thing. It's worth it to go and read the errata page.
2. Well I had finished the KS+BB book and was feeling cocky, so I went and did Dan's mock exams. Oh, dear... I didn't feel so cocky after that
Dan's exams are way harder than the real thing but are great for ensuring that you really understand the topics covered on the exam.
3. Do EVERY mock exam you can find. Don't take the answers in all them as gospel but do them to refine and develop your
test taking expertise. Which brings me to my main points....
4. Relax and Take your time when taking tests! At the start I was getting poor scores in the mock exams because I was flying through them, worried about the time remaining. You have lots of time. When you see the question:
- Read the intro to the question first
- Scan the answers... be VERY sure that you know EXACTLY what the question is looking for. How many options are to be chosen? Does the question ask for options that are *correct* or *incorrect*? Now look at the answers again. Are you REALLY sure you know what they're asking?
- If there is code read it now. Do a quick sanity check... modifiers OK? keywords OK? curly braces OK? etc. You'll probably have a first guess at the answer now.
- Now read the code/examine the answers AGAIN. Are you sure? Are you really REALLY sure? Can you explain to yourself in your head why the other answers are INCORRECT?
- The more mock test you take, the faster you can do this.. get at them mocks!
5. I think proper test taking technique can give you +15% on your score. What I did was:
- I took a quick scan through the questions. I answered the easy ones (following the above rules!). If I wasn't 100% sure of the answer then I marked it.
- If I hit a question that had complicated code or required some manual calculations, I marked it and skipped past it.
- At the end of about 1 hour I had answered about 50 of the 61 questions. Now I felt really good, no pressure. About 17 questions were marked.
- Now I went and did the complicated questions. I knew I had lots of time now so I used the scratch pad to work them out. Again. I took my time and stepped through the code methodically. When I was happy with my answer I unmarked the question.
- Now I had about 40 mins left and about 5-6 questions that I has answered in the first pass but I was uncertain about. I went back to these and double checked. I found 2 of my original answers were wrong.
- Now I had about 25 mins left and all questions were answered. I took a final pass through all the questions. Nice and slowly... Am I sure? Am I REALLY sure? Well for two questions I discovered something I hadn't seen before (damn sneaky exam writers!) and ended up changing my answer. (Make sure you know why you're changing it... nerves can do funny things. Are you sure? Are you RE.. ah you get it
)
- Finally I finished the test with about 3 mins left. I got a mark of 100% but would probably have done much worse if I hadn't approached the exam in the right way.
I hope that this is useful to everybody going for the exam. Please don't follow my advice if you find that it doesn't work for you, but have a plan, relax, take your time, don't panic, (oh yeah, study a little
) and you can do it!
Thanks all, off to lie down now.
Colin.
