I just returned from prometric
testing centre with a nice number (94) on my exam report. I started my preparation about 6 months ago, I used HFSJ first edition, Marcus Green's web, notes from Mikalai Z., and specs. I read HFSJ multiple times - I had no previous experience, so I was confused :-)
Mocks I used:
Marcus Green mocks
- easier than real exam, some questions have bugs - 90-95%
http://www.j2eecertificate.com/ - nice page, my first hard exam resulted in 65%, final mock in 91%
- I learned a few tricks here
Enthuware JWebPlus v4
- 88%, 82%, 91%, 81%, 89%, 89%, 78%
- few questions are wrong, but otherwise it's a nice collection of mocks
Exam:
- time is on your side
180 minutes is a lot,.. I wouldn't worry about time. I filled all answers in 90 minutes, then checked all of them in 30 minutes.
- Homer's epic poem
Some questions are lengthy, but that should not scare you. Sometimes it's only introduction to a problem and in the end is a question like: "Which of these will compile?" - you could answer that without knowing how some anonymous company obtained their legacy tag library, right? :-)
- mark the answer with familiar syntax
Usually it's not that simple. I saw mocks where they ask you, which syntax is right and then presented a few completely different choices. Be prepared, that choices on real exam will look very similar. So, it is always a good practice to read all choices, and if you didn't mark some choice try to answer why is it wrong.
- I've seen it all before
That's what I thought after I went through ~500-700 mock questions. Well, I was wrong. After first question I thought I'm on wrong exam, because it was some insanely hard deployment topic - the one with a company and legacy library/tag/code, so I was afraid, that all of them will be like that :-).
- public void doExam() throws javax.servlet.Unexpected
more classic tag questions than I expected
tough deployment questions - and I don't mean DD tags questions
only 3 drag'n'drop questions
You should be familiar with API, which are interfaces, which are classes, what methods, return types, parameters, exceptions are there.
Overall, I think exam is balanced, it tests if you have solid understanding on topics, and there are (almost) no questions on some picky details, which are mentioned only in dark corners of specs.
[ May 23, 2008: Message edited by: John Stone ]
