The poor speller taking the essay

[Philip Smith]

English is my native language; however I must confess I am a terrible speller. Yes this has been a major source of personal and professional embarrassment. Even though I am months away from scheduling the essay portion of my examination I have already begun to worry. Are the essay answers to be handwritten or may use some sort of word processing software. If the answer is some sort of word processing software does it come with spell checking capability? Will points be deducted for misspellings and/or errors in grammar? I would appreciate any insight as to what I should expect when taking the essay examination.

[Min Huang]

and how about spelling errors in my comments or javadocs? how would that affect my score? i tend to type REEEEEEEEEALLY fast and sometimes spelling errors slip in that i dont notice.

[Philippe Maquet]

Hi Philip,
Welcome to JavaRanch and this forum!
A majority (just a guess) of candidates are not native English speakers, meaning that SUN's graders are used to spelling and grammar mistakes.
So I don't think that points would be deducted for mistakes in that area.
Regards,
Phil.