Hello All!!
Yesterday I gave my
SCJP and passed out (phew!) with 92%.
'twas quite easy in the end.No Media Tracker. No Sockets. Lots on I/O though and I am thankful to this forum because participating inmany of the discussions orientedme coorectly towards the issues to be addressed in the real exam.
Marcus Green's exams seem the closest simulator. Thanks to him, if he is seeing this, for the invaluable help.
I must also thank Bill Brogden specially for taking the pains to mail me his set of hardest questions as the
applet didnt load in my machine. When I did this set,I made a couple of very basic mistakes and quite conveniently, got two very similar questions in the exam. And needless to say,i didnt repeat the mistakes!!
Thanks ,Bill. You have beenmost helpful.
The breakup was about
4 on threads, 4 on I/O, 6 on AWT stuff(very basic though.Guess it is enough to know which field does what even in the supposedly diffcult topic of gridbaglayout).about 6-7 on exceptions .Lots on declarations and syntax. Fared well in almost all sections except overloading and overriding where I got a miserly 63%. Ironical,considering that was the one topic I went into the hall fully confident of.Shows that one shouldnt be too sure about anything:-))
Making One's own notes definitely helps. Though mine are pretty haphazard and useless as I see them now.
Reviewing most certainly helps.I finished the exam in exactly 59 minutes and spent every second of the next 61 minutes reviewing and re-reviewing.Fixed atleast four mistakes this way.
And watch out for the syntax. Seemingly perfect declarations and statements might have some very basic syntax errors. It helps to treat every question without categorising it into threads,I/O etc.
For instance I found on my fourth review that a question,which I had answered supposing it to be in I/O turned out to have an option which was syntactically incorrect .
And lastly, a clear-cut knowledge of the English Language is a must!!WATCH OUT For the differences between "should","can" and "must". These definitely matter!!
And as a last tip to any wannabes, be sure you follow the discussions in this forum, experiment based on the issues people raise here and that should ,I reckon,give you a 50% advantage
Thanks to maha anna, marcus, bill, ajith among others for their lucid explanations on various issues in the forum
Thanks to you all for being helpful in various ways.
cheers and good luck to you all..
RCT