I passed
SCJP 5.0 today (July 26) with 64%. Although I am happy about passing, I thought I should share my experience with the
test, which was disappointing to say the least.
I had a variety of �interesting� display problems with drag-and-drop questions. They seemed to be problems with the Prometric test engine.
1. The drag boxes do not show any text within them. In other words, there are no code fragments to read and move around. There are simply blank boxes all over the place.
2. A question has its right end chopped off because the text lines do not wrap properly. Of course, no horizontal scroll bar is offered.
3. Code fragments are horizontally centered within drag boxes, with their left and right ends chopped off.
You should understand the context and guess the left and right ends.
4. A question has text lines vertically overlapping which makes it impossible to be comprehended. In this particular question, the question text also blocks a diagram that needs to be seen. You can only imagine what could have been drawn there.
I tackled all drag-and-drop problems after I was finished with multiple-choice problems. I was lucky to use that strategy. When I talked to the test center people, there was nothing that they could do to fix the problem. The test clock kept counting down while I was asking around, and I returned to my seat to answer the drag-and-drop questions without display problems.
After all, I could not answer 5 unreadable drag-and-drop questions. I am curious as to what Sun or Prometric would have offered, if I had not passed because of the 5 questions plus the time wasted looking for someone to fix the situation.
Another ridiculous incident happened earlier on last Friday (July 22), when I originally scheduled to take the test. The test center could not retrieve my test on their computer! After about an hour of futile phone conversations with a Prometric representative and turning on/off the test server, the test operator asked me to reschedule the test. Prometric offered no explanation about it.
I wonder if anyone who took SCJP 5.0 experienced similar problems. I hope Prometric or Sun does something to prevent these fundamental problems from happening again. Until then, whenever I take a Sun test at a Prometric test center, I will just have to pray that I would not run into another disaster!
