Sudd,
Thank you for using my mock exams.
The number of answer options for my mock exam questions often greatly exceeds what you will find on the real exam. My goal was to build a set of single topic exams that can be used along with an exam study guide. The questions are intended to function more like study exercises rather than as examples of what might be found on the real exam. That's why I always encourage people to use my exam during the early phases of the study process rather than immediately before taking the real exam.
The real exam will require you to remember the signatures of some methods such as the wrapper methods that you mentioned. I suggest making a set of flash
cards that cover those methods and use the flash
cards immediately before taking the exam. You will also want to memorize the Math class methods mentioned in the objectives: abs, ceil, floor, max, min, random, round, sin, cos, tan, sqrt. You will also want to make flash cards that cover the constructors for the
Thread class.
You should also make sure that you memorize the runtime options for assertions such as -ea, -da, -esa, and -dsa.
The 1.4 exam has a variety of questions concerning compile time errors. Some answer options will ask if a compile time error occurs at a particular line of code but sometimes there might be an answer option for any compiler error. Kathy provided a good example in another thread here at the Saloon. An anonymous class was declared but the semicolon was missing from the end of the declaration statement. One of the answer options was something like "The code does not compile". Obviously, that question would have been far less effective if it had specifically pointed out the missing semicolon.
You also asked about "quick" questions and those with long code examples. The real exam does have a lot of quick questions. The code examples in my exam tend to be much longer that what will be found on the real exam. That's because my exam questions are primarily intended to be learning exercises. For example, most of the code examples on my Thread exam are much longer that what you will find on the real exam. That's because many of thread questions contain code that is intended to produce a specific result if the program is run. In contrast, there is no expectation that you will cut a code example from the real exam and paste it into a text editor for compilation and
testing. Since Sun knows that you won't be running the code during the exam they did not design the questions for testing at home.
Similarly, my garbage collection questions often make use of the finalize method to demonstrate when objects become eligible for garbage collection. (Of course, there is no guarantee that the garbage collector will actually run.) For that reason, my garbage collection questions often contain a large amount of thread synchronization code. Of course, you won't find anything similar on the real exam. Even so, I think that my garbage collection questions are an interesting learning tool even though they are often dissimilar to what you will actually encounter on the real exam. My hope is that you can use my exam to learn the fundamental concepts and then use other exams such as the Marcus Green exam or Kathy's exam or some of the commercial exams to get practice with questions that are more representative of what will actually be encountered on the real exam.
I hope the above is helpful.
[ October 27, 2002: Message edited by: Dan Chisholm ]