Hello All,
I have just got back from the Prometrics
test site having passed the
SCEA part I exam. Thanks to all contributors to this forum for their valuable contributions. I felt that it might be appropriate to respond in kind, and pass on some tips whilst the exam is fresh in my mind.
i) The exam was 48 multiple choice questions which the candidate is given 75 minutes to complete. There were *no* free form questions. In those cases where there was more than one correct answer the exam tells you (very handy). Curiously the exam commenced with a survey which asked questions pertaining to the candidate's experience with
J2EE (I don't know if this had any bearing on the complexity of the exam which followed :-)
ii) The exam is far more general than I was expecting. Questions pertaining to EJB technology were far less technical than the IBM ICE exam 483. A few people have alluded to the O'Reilly EJB book as required reading, however I feel that this book is much more detailed than the exam requires, despite it being an excellent resource. I would suggest that the Sun J2EE tutorial is adequate.
iii) At least two questions involved DNS round robin. I can recommend the O'Reilly DNS & BIND book for info on this topic.
iv) There were a few simple UML questions (UML Distilled by Fowler will get you across the line if you're rusty), and I would estimate three to four questions related to the GoF Design
Patterns (again pretty simple).
v) At least four to five questions related to legacy enterprise integration (e.g. screen scraping, third party MoM ...etc).
vi) Read the longer worded questions *carefully* as they are worded in such a way that if you scan them quickly you might be inclined to pick the wrong answers.
vii) I went through the exam in sequence which may have not been the best approach because the first couple of questions had me a bit bogged down to start with.
viii) A handful of the questions seemed to be based on material covered in the Sun J2EE Architecture training course 425, so getting the course notes, or attending the training may be a good idea.
In terms of time I finished with about 15 to 20 minutes to spare, however this did not prove long enough to review all my answers (there were a handful of answers which were I needed to review).
Thanks and regards,
Andrew