Hello everybody,
I passed
SCJP in first attempt scoring 98% and I am happy to share this with you. Many thanks to Javaranch and the moderators. I have been a frequent visitor of this site for about a month and questions and suggestions posted here were really helpful to me in the exam.
The exam:
The exam was similar to many mock exams listed on Maha Anna's site. It is mostly about the basic language and not too much of remembering API is required. The only question I got wrong was on java.util, which, I thought was one of my stronger topics. The distribution of questions was:
2 on I/O
2-3 on Threads
1 on util
4-5 on flow control
2 OO design type questions
many on overloading, overriding
My preparation:
I prepared for about 1 month. I used the books RHE, Exam Cram, Thinking in
Java, Core Java and the JLS. I took several mock exams listed on Maha Anna's site and scored 93%-95% during the last week of my preparation. Questions in the actual exam are more clearly worded without ambiguity because of which you are likely to score 2-3% more in the actual exam compared to the mock exam scores.
My suggestions:
Read the question until you understand it completely(more than once if required).
For questions with code, read the answers first.
Complete understanding of concepts for topics such as Threads and garbage collection is required to answer multiple select questions. In few questions there were only fine differences between the correct and incorrect answers.
Review, review, review!! - I corrected 2 questions in my review.
Thanks again.
Vani