Originally posted by Ken Rubin:
The actual test was more difficult than I anticipated. It seemed that they
were looking for more subtleties, which slowed me down alot. I apologize for the length of this message, but have much to share.
Had passed the mock Head First EJB test with 66%. There is a matrix somewhere on this site that shows most people do 10-20 points higher on actual exam. After had reviewed my mistakes and redid those questions a few days later.
I had spent several months reviewing and bought Sun's practice exams. One of them I did open book, but the other two I scored 73% and 79% percent closed book. I was able to finish these tests in 1:10 and then review them. I had more time management problems with the actual exam, as discussed below.
When I did SCJP these exams were harder than actual exam, where I scored 88%.
I had real trouble with the mechanics of the drag and drop section parts. The labels would simply not drop in place. They would go back to the original position. It took 10 minutes or more for the Thompson Prometrics people to straighten me out, which was flustering.
It seems that when you drag the labels, you must put the cursor as much in the middle of the label as possible, before dragging it. Yet this did not work perfectly all of the time, but did after a try or two for subsequent questions. It would be easier if perhaps you could place a number in a space, which correspondeds to a label and causes it to drag itself.
What was also difficult is that one cannot review a drag drop question, without having to drag everything back into place again and rethink the question. There should be a seperate view mode!
There were about 10 questions for like this for things like Enterprise bean environment, responsibilites and EJB QL.
I'm aware of someone writing March 14, 2004 about the same issues. Ranch hands kindly responded to them and most definitely spoke to Sun, but nothing happened. I'll email Sun too. Good luck to me![]()
I would say that the mechanics lost me about 15-20 minutes, which stopped me from a better review and giving proper effort to some longer questions such as creating an EJB QL query from drag and drop elements and a scenario question, with a 2 paragraph description. Also I didn't bother reviewing the drag and drop questions due to how long it would take to put them back together again.
Some things that I could have prepared more for were actually writing complex EJB QL queries from descriptions and being able to reproduce sections of the DD from memory, not by only recognizing the majority of the DD elements. Also since I did Sun's practice exams so quickly, I thought that the 2.0 hours + that I spend on the HF exam was just an anomaly of that exam. Really try to do it in two hours!
I was so burned out after the exam, I didn't want to see how my individual sections were scored, before I saw the final grade. Also I was not at all sure that I passed!
It also makes me wounder if different versions of the exam are maybe harder than others or perhaps just different enough to be more in line with an individuals preperations.
Enough ranting and raving. I am still happy to be a SCBCD !!!
My wife has also heard enough about it![]()
SCJP 1.4 -- 95%<br />SCWCD 1.4 -- 91%<br />SCBCD 1.3 -- In progress
Spot false dilemmas now, ask me how!
(If you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room.)
I am still happy to be a SCBCD !!!
Patrick<br /> <br />SCJP/SCWCD/SCBCD/SCDJWS/SCEA<br /> <br />Currently working on:<br />SCJP 6
SCJP,SCWCD
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