Thanks to Kathy, Bert, the rest of the Javaranch staff, Marcus Green, Dan Chisholm, and all the folks on the
SCJP forum.
I studied very intensively for over a month, possibly two. I read K&B, took all their chapter exams (mostly at Starbucks). I tried to answer lots of SCJP forum questions that were complex and therefore taught me new details. I took lots and lots of mock exams, including mastering the Rules Roundup. I took most of Dan Chisholm's 20 exams, which are much harder than real exam questions. I learned something new from my mistakes on every Chisholm exam I took. Marcus Green's exams were very helpful, and of course the exams that came with K&B were great because they teach you the format of the real exam. I also took various other mock exams, some easy, some very hard.
I made sure I was well rested, well fed, hydrated, and had used the bathroom before my real exam started.
On my first pass through the exam, I answered every question, and checked the Mark button for every question that I had any hesitation about at all, which was about 20 of them. The first pass took about 1 hour. Then I used the second hour to go through all the questions I had marked, gradually removing the Mark condition from each one as I convinced myself that I had the right answer. (Started getting hungry at this point, but pressed on.)
On one question I simply couldn't decide between 2 answers because I just didn't know whether
thread priorities were guaranteed to dictate execution order, or whether they were merely likely to guide execution order. I guessed that they were not guaranteed, which must have been wrong, since my score report says my one wrong answer was a thread question.
After the second pass, where I removed the Marks, I did one very quick pass just to count the answers I'd selected on each question, since I had a bad habit of occasionally giving the wrong number of answers on mock exam.
With about 30 minutes left, I figured I was finished, but there was no harm in proofreading a little, so I did one last pass where I skimmed the questions and answers to see if I'd catch anything new now that I was very familiar with the
test. I finished that pass with 6 minutes to go, and ended the test.