How much effort for developer exam..

[Alan Mc Kernan]

Hey Guys,

I just passed the 1.4 programmer exam with 95%. I have some experience with network/JDBC/swing/xml programming (through college assignments). Roughly speaking how much effort do you reckon it will take me to complete the developers exam with a reasonably high score?

I beleive the pass rate is 80%.. that seems very high indeed! Is this a very difficult exam/assignment to take?

Thanks,
Alan

[Saheed Adepoju]

Hi
Well speaking about it being high, i personally agree it should be cause it totally proves you can use the Java Language to write standard software to solve a problem and given all the scenario of a real business requirement! Well just download your assignment, buy Andrew's upcoming book and stick to the ranch and would be SCJD in no time! Good luck with your quest! Have a nice day and Welcome to this Forum!

[Alan Mc Kernan]

Ok cool..

In no time ? Could you give me a rough idea of how many hours we're talking. I gather about 40~ hours for the project. Does that a discovery stage/ design time/ documentation etc?

And roughly how big is the essay itself?

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi Alan,

I think the 40 hours would include discovery time and documentation time. The documentation is not too difficult: you have to create Javadoc, user documentation, and a document describing your design choices. Most of this you will be writing as you go along.

As for the essay exam - it is very simple. The purpose (as near as we can gather) is to provide Sun with some way of veryifying that you developed your submission. That is - the essay exam forces you to prove to Prometric that you are who you say you are (you have to provide identification to Prometric) and then asks you questions relating to the submission - if you did not develop the submission, you are not likely to get the answers right.

To give you an example, you might get an exam question like "did you choose RMI or Sockets for your network layer, and why did you choose it"? Obviously if you answered RMI when the real submission uses Sockets then there is something drastically wrong .

[By the way - that is the only example question from the SCJD exam we allow to be posted here]

Regards, Andrew

[Nicklas Hallenborg]

Hi Alan,
Let me first say that I have a deep respect for Andrew. I got a lot of help by reading his posts. Thanks.
I do think that 40 hours is a bit low thow...
It took me about 140 hours to complete the exam.
I have been working with Java for 7 years and completed the exam with the score 376 (400).

Regards
Nicklas

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi Alan & Nicklas,

Mmmm, it is very hard to judge how long it will take to complete the assignment. I know that if I sat down now to do it, I would probably be able to complete it in under 40 hours - but then I have spent a lot of time in this forum discussing these projects for several years, so I have a major advantage over anyone just starting the assignment from scratch .

In the JavaRanch SCJD FAQ there is the question "How Long will it take me to complete the assignment?". That might give a better feeling for the time required.

Regards, Andrew

[Frans Janssen]

FWIW it took me a 100 hours to complete the assignment and I like to think that I stayed very focussed. And that does not include the countless hours I have spent on this forum.
Of course if I were to do it again I could probably do it in lees than half of the time, but that is comparing apples and oranges.

Regarding the 80% pass rate: it is not surprisingly high, because you can take as much time for the assignment as you like. Which should mean that you only submit your work when your are satisfied that you did a good job. So apparently a whopping 20% of the candidates make an error of judgement there...

Frans.