Hi Mehmet,
First, congratulations on uploading your assignment.
Originally posted by Mehmet Atlihan:
Hi guys
I feel like to join the conversation as I uploaded my assignment today as well. I appreciate if someone can give me a feedback as to how to register for essay exam and the context of it.
The hard part really is over.
The essay exam is not difficult if you remember what you did on the project and why you did it that way. The answers to almost all the essay exam questions are (or
should be) contained in your design decisions document. Three out of the four questions I received fell into this category. The fourth question was unexpected and dealt with a very minor implementation decision. There were two problems with this question:
1) even though I had read through my code before taking the essay exam (and I recommend everyone do this before taking the exam), I didn't have a very clear memory of exactly which way I went with the implementation (I know this sounds lame, but trust me it was a really minor decision).
2) after racking my brain and vaguely remembering what I had done, I was then somewhat at a loss as to
why I had made that decision. In other words, I couldn't remember the pros and cons of making the decision because quite honestly I'm not sure I weighed the pros and cons -- I didn't spend that much time thinking about it.
Luckily my grad school training kicked in -- you know where they teach you how to write a comprehensive sounding response to a question regardless if you really know the answer or not -- and I was able to hash out a (good) reason why I had done what I had done and then one or two additional reasons (neither of which was very convincing). Suffice it to say it was my weakest answer on the entire exam.
In hindsight I could potentially have misremembered which way I went on this design decision and so I perhaps should have said that I honestly didn't remember which way I went and then describe why I thought this was of minor importance. I could of then discussed in very general terms some of the pros and cons (the few I could remember) and then say that really there was little to recommend one way over the other, so I just chose one (not exactly sure which) and implemented it correctly to serve my purposes.
The reason I was not terribly worried about this question is that one must remember the purpose of the exam is to convince the examiner that you are the person that wrote the project that you submitted. My answers to the other three questions could leave no possible doubt in the examiner's mind that I had actually done the work I submitted. Another reason is that this particular question really is kind of out of left field, it's a weird question in that it's at a much lower level of detail than the other questions. That is, even though I was only able to muster a weak response to this question, I thought it very likely that most of the other people taking this version of the exam would have the same problem. In other words, I suppose the answer to this question will be everyone's weakest response and therefore it's really not worth worrying about.
If when you finish your exam you are able to say: "someone who had not developed my project would have had a very difficult time giving the kind of answers I gave", then you've accomplished your mission which to reiterate: is to convince the examiner that you wrote the project you submitted and that you have some level of understanding of why you did what you did (the deeper the level of understanding the better of course, but even if you don't remember all the reasons it's still not a fatal deficiency).
How does one register for the exam? The same way you registered for the
SCJP Exam. It seems to me you should be able to take the
SCJD exam at the same location. You should be able to get contact information from the Sun website if you've forgotten how you registered for the SCJP.
Finally, I think Alain Trottier has done a good job of indicating what aspects of the project would make good essay exam questions. I believe you can get this information online at the following link (look at Chapter 19):
Java� 2 Developer Exam Cram� 2 (Exam CX-310-252A and CX-310-027)