Please see my other post on the exam objectives... but here's the scoop for now:
The process for requesting vouchers for the beta has NOT begun! It will not happen until January! What Sara is referring to was the survey for the objectives. Those who took the survey were offered a beta voucher in
exchange for participating in that survey. But we still need a LOT more people (hundreds!) to participate in the actual beta exam! And the sign-ups for those additional vouchers have not yet begun.
So... be patient for just a few more weeks and you will hear the details about that. We will be creating the exam in January. Michael Yuan was really the lead developer of the objectives, although unless we kidnap him and whisk him to Colorado, he won't be able to break from his schedule to help us create the final exam. But he will still be helping us with the questions, so he will have a very good sense of the kinds of questions that you might expect, and how
you should prepare.
The process will go something like this - but this schedule is not final!!
Non-finalized idea of how things might go...
1) Mid-January -- exam is created
2) Late January or very early February -- we will announce and take sign-ups for the beta
3) Late February or very early March -- the beta exam will run, and the results analyzed (and final questions chosen... some questions are deleted during beta for being too hard or too easy, or just WRONG.)
4) Late April / very early May -- the exam will be released as final
We WILL be starting an SCMAD exam forum here at javaranch, but I do not know when. Probably not until January, when the process of signing up for the beta begins.
Study tips: Stay tuned here (and later on the SCMAD forum) and we will do as much as we can. There *will*, of course, be a study guide coming out, but it won't be ready in time for the beta. However, we will post cheat sheets and maybe some rough draft pages or chapters from the study guide. Whatever we can do to help you prepare for the beta. But the objectives I posted have the actual spec (and possibly spec part) where you should be studying!
cheers and thanks (and happy holidays!)
Kathy