OK, True Confessions time, Andrew.
I failed my very first
SCJP exam in 1997! I took it again two weeks later and passed with a *decent* (not great) score. I had been required by Sun to take/pass the exam *before* coming to my job interview, and they gave me two weeks for my initial preparation. Prior to that I'd been doing some
Java development (in Java 1.02), but the exam was on Java 1.1, and I had been doing only
Applets and really didn't understand enough of the language, and obviously not *nearly* as much as I thought I did. In fact, it was my bad experience on the exam is what led me to start javaranch. At that time, I was on discussion forums on newsgroups (like comp.lang.java) and it was really rough.
On the exam that I failed, my score was about as close as you were on this one. I realized *after* I took it that I just hadn't had quite enough time to let the material really sink in. I was getting *somewhat* decent scores on mock exams at the time I took the actual exam, so I actually *did* expect that I'd pass... barely, but I didn't.
So hang in there!!
This exam is much more involved and WAY more difficult than the previous (1.3) version of SCWCD. People are struggling with it and, believe me, during the creation of the exam the guy who was the lead of the JSP spec mentioned that HE would have trouble passing it... because it involved SO many areas that he didn't usually deal with in his daily development life.
Don't forget we're all here to help you, and you're in a very special "elite" group of those who took TWO tries to pass one of these exams
I count myself as a leading member of that special club--welcome to the group!
-Kathy