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Passed SCJP 1.5 today with 83%

 
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Hi All
Today I took the SCJP 1.5 exam and passed with 83 % (60 out of 72). I want to share my story with others..

Started preparing for SCJP summer last year with Phil Heller book (1.5). Completed the reading, exams etc but felt that the new topics like generics, collections were not at all covered well in that book. So waited for K&B and waited and waited....

Finally Jan this year bought that book, completed the first pass of reading, did exercises after reading the chapters. It is very important that you make notes all along, they help very much in the end.

Then I did a second pass, some from my notes, some from the chapters etc and did chapter exercises again, I was fairing all most similar(but a little better) to the results in first pass.

Then I read the MZ notes.. they are very good although very intense and deep, I updated my notes with new findings etc.

Then I took Phil Heller book mock exams, they are quite easy. They claim that there are 4 exams but actually its a small pool of questions and those 4 exams are only a shuffle of each other.

Then I took the Marcus Green mock exams(60 or so questions). I used to do it 10 questions at a time, updated my notes accordingly.

I also did the mock exams at jchq.net. They are also good.

Then I read the Generics tutorial from Sun, it is very good.

All along I never had a chance to actually take a 3 hr mock exam( example from the K&B book). Since I had already scheduled the exam for today, I was little scared also about I decided to go for it instead of postponing the date. I just revised my notes twice in the last week and thats it.

The exam questions were good. The concurrency questions were trickier and time consuming mostly asking the output of the code snippet. The DragNDrop questions weren't that tough as the noise is. If you know the stuff, they are easy and quick to do. The only thing I found was that the drop operation doesnot work all the time. Sometimes I had to do it few times in order for the dragNdrop to succeed. I recommed that people watch for the mouse cursor during this operation. If the cursor is a circle with a bar crossing it, this means the operation wont succeed, if everything is well, it will change to an arrow with a rectangle underneath it.

I faired 68 in concurrency, 100 in collections&Generics, Declarations. 62 in OO (which was a surprise), rest of the topics had in 90s.

I had 10 mins left at the end, decided to review some of the Marked questions. When I tried to review them, most of my marked were "TASK" questions meaning dragNDrop, so it used to ask me that the previous answer will be lost if I decide to review my answer. I quickly said "No" as I did not want to redo it.

And then I pressed the END button. It did not tell me the result and just said that the report will print at the office. I went outside hoping to hear good news and went at the desk. She told me congrats and what a sigh of relief !! I did not care about my marks at that time and then saw it when she handed over the marks sheet to me.

So I highly recommend K&B 5.0 . There hasn't been any other SCJP book since THE BIG BANG !

My next attempt would be for J2EE, havent decided which one yet.

Thanks & Good luck to all of you.

God bless

-Rupak
 
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Congratulations on your succeed, comrade.

It is seems you've done a lot of hard work to get certified.

Enjoy the moment today. Tomorrow you will have time to pick another challenge. And believe me there's a jungle out there waiting to be hunted.


[ April 15, 2006: Message edited by: Edwin Dalorzo ]
 
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Congrats ! and thank you for sharing your experience.
 
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Congratz !!!
 
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Congratz and thanks for your valuable tips
 
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Congrats for your score.

Can u tell me what are the MZ notes and which Generics tutorial is present on the SUN website. Please reply. Thanks
 
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Hi all, i have been working with Java 1.4 since about 6 months and as a part of my project requirement i have been told to clear SCJP. The problem is that now Java 1.5 which is the certification exam for Java 1.5 is available and most of guys prefer it, but since i have to clear the SCJP in 1 month's time it is not possible for me to go for SCJP 1.5, instead i m confident enough to go for SCJP 1.4 as i have worked with Java 1.4 from past 6 months or so.
So is there any way of upgrading or giving some test equivalent to SCJP 1.5 after clearing SCJP 1.4 instead of going for SCJP 1.5 later.
And finally now when SCJP 1.5 is available is it worth it to go for SCJP 1.4 .

Thanks for the reply in advance

Prams
 
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Hello,

Congrats. Iam new to SCJP and JavaRanch, would you pls tell me what's K&B.


Thank You.
 
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Hi Rupak,

Many congrats and thanks for sharing your valuable experience.
BTW, what are "MZ Notes" and where can we find them??

Cheers!
Ravinder
 
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Hi Rupak,
Congrats man...........
Can u share me ur notes and mock....
i'm also preparing for SCJP1.5
 
Rupak Khurana
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One could take the 1.4 exam and then later take the upgrade exam to 1.5
The SCJP 1.5 exam is considered to be tougher as new topics have been added and the older ones beefed up.

K&B 5.0 is the marvellous book -> SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (Exam 310-055) (Certification Press Study Guides) (Paperback)
by Katherine Sierra, Bert Bates

No other SCJP preparation book can stand up to it. I have also read SCJP 5.0 book by Phil Heller and it sucks badly whereas K&B rocks.

Once you are done with SCJP and if decide to go for SCWCD, buy the book Head First Servlets and JSPs (same authors again). People consider it to be THE BEST for SCWCD exam as well

MZ notes are from the great guy Mikalai Zaikin - He has many free notes at his website for many certifications. SCJP notes are :-

http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/

Sun Generics Tutorial is :-
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5/pdf/generics-tutorial.pdf

So if you stick to K&B and MZ and do some mock exams, you should be in good shape.

[email protected]
 
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Congrats !!!
So ur
u now.



And ofcourse, its

I must appriciate ur spirit to share information.
Thanks and Keep it up.
 
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Congrats Rupak!

And thanks for your kind words, we're very happy that the book helped.

Now let's slide this over to the results forum

Bert
 
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Congrats

m also preparing 4 SCJP 1.5. i think i have 2 go thru a lot for this....
 
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