Hi all,
Well, I passed the SCJP 5.0 exam today, with a fantastic 62%. At least it's passing. It would've been much more embarassing to fail it. I was feeling pretty confident about this exam, since I do pretty well on the mock exams, and did 85% and 97% on the K&B exams in the past couple of days. For my study guides, I used K&B 1.4, and the http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/ Tiger guide. I sprinkled in other websites and mock exams when I got the chance, but nothing major. Obviously, I didn't study the Tiger guide as much as I should have. The test is so different from the 1.4 mock exams, I may have done myself a disservice by getting ready for 1.4 and then deciding on 5.0. It might have been better to just wait, and study for 5.0. I know, I had a warning when I saw that K&B was going to be changing by like 50%!
Generics were my biggest fault. I thought I felt good about them, and have used them at work, but I didn't study nearly enough on the many tricks you can do with them.
The way the exam was structured didn't help either. The drag-and-drop questions were a killer! Just when I thought that a point-n-click exam couldn't be just like real coding. ;-) I used all of my 3 hours, with no time to really go over marked questions.
I'm not complaining - at least I passed, with no 5.0 study guides on the market. But, this hardly seems worth bragging about.
I do have one question.. one "Task" question I ran into had answers that all referred to Cars and other real-life objects, when the actual question/code had nothing but objects named A, B, and C. This might be a bug. I typed something about this in the Comments section. Do people read those? Who else should I ask/email about it?
There was also another issue I had with that question. I had not answered it, expecting to get prompted for it at the end of the exam. But, I didn't. I think these "Task" questions with the popup-window of drag-n-drops don't get flagged when you don't answer them. Has anyone else seen this? I also didn't like how if you went back to it, you'd have your answers wiped out, and you'd have to re-answer it. But, I can deal with that part.
I was thinking about getting the 25% discount and getting the voucher for SCJD, but these results have my confidence a little shaken. I've never had a score like this. Should I be worried?
Any feedback is appreciated!
MS
[ June 27, 2005: Message edited by: Mike Sanders ]
[ June 27, 2005: Message edited by: Mike Sanders ]
Well, I passed the SCJP 5.0 exam today, with a fantastic 62%. At least it's passing. It would've been much more embarassing to fail it. I was feeling pretty confident about this exam, since I do pretty well on the mock exams, and did 85% and 97% on the K&B exams in the past couple of days. For my study guides, I used K&B 1.4, and the http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/ Tiger guide. I sprinkled in other websites and mock exams when I got the chance, but nothing major. Obviously, I didn't study the Tiger guide as much as I should have. The test is so different from the 1.4 mock exams, I may have done myself a disservice by getting ready for 1.4 and then deciding on 5.0. It might have been better to just wait, and study for 5.0. I know, I had a warning when I saw that K&B was going to be changing by like 50%!
Generics were my biggest fault. I thought I felt good about them, and have used them at work, but I didn't study nearly enough on the many tricks you can do with them.
The way the exam was structured didn't help either. The drag-and-drop questions were a killer! Just when I thought that a point-n-click exam couldn't be just like real coding. ;-) I used all of my 3 hours, with no time to really go over marked questions.
I'm not complaining - at least I passed, with no 5.0 study guides on the market. But, this hardly seems worth bragging about.
I do have one question.. one "Task" question I ran into had answers that all referred to Cars and other real-life objects, when the actual question/code had nothing but objects named A, B, and C. This might be a bug. I typed something about this in the Comments section. Do people read those? Who else should I ask/email about it?
There was also another issue I had with that question. I had not answered it, expecting to get prompted for it at the end of the exam. But, I didn't. I think these "Task" questions with the popup-window of drag-n-drops don't get flagged when you don't answer them. Has anyone else seen this? I also didn't like how if you went back to it, you'd have your answers wiped out, and you'd have to re-answer it. But, I can deal with that part.
I was thinking about getting the 25% discount and getting the voucher for SCJD, but these results have my confidence a little shaken. I've never had a score like this. Should I be worried?
Any feedback is appreciated!
MS
[ June 27, 2005: Message edited by: Mike Sanders ]
[ June 27, 2005: Message edited by: Mike Sanders ]