Howdy folks,
passed the exam today. What a great feeling. I'm sure I could have had a better score if I had done more actual coding in some of my weak areas like file I/O and AWT. Most of what I do at work is focused more on servlets/JSP,
EJB and
JDBC. However, I am quite happy with the 80%.
Spent a total of about 6 months studying at a leisurely pace, with the last couple of weeks working on as many mocks as I could find. I've found that I have really learned a lot about
Java, so it is much more than just passing a
test.
I used RHE, Exam Cram, and JCertify. The exam wasn't as tricky as I expected, and there were many more of the single-choice (radio buttons) than I thought there would be. It also surprised me that none of the questions were tricky along the lines of "select which statement is false" rather than "true." Also, nothing wrong with any of the public static void main(
String args[]) method in any of the questions. After I was done, I went back over all the questions and specifically checked for those two things, because I had gotten burned a couple of times with that in some of the mocks.
I think that if you are comfortable with Marcus's mocks, then the real exam should be fine. I scored anywhere from 66% to 88% on those. Did terrible on the Hardest Questions and on Khalid's mock. But still, I think they are good for learning.
I found that the online discussion groups, like this one here and also on jchq.net were very helpful. Especially those posts which discussed people's experience with the exam. If I hadn't kept up with those, I wouldn't have known about GridBagLayout, MediaTracker, or sockets. Those things would have really thrown me off if I hadn't been expecting them.
Good luck to everyone studying for the test, and thanks to everyone who takes the time to help others.
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toodles,
Liz