Hi,
I passed the
SCJP exam on Saturday. I would like to give couple of tips (or I should say 'what I feel about the exam') for those who are going to appear soon. This is more about the way one should "approach/take" this exam not how one should study.
a) The real exam is comparatively easier than most of the mocks. I had tried Dan's mocks, Marcus's mocks and K&B master exams. So the chances of getting a better score than in your mocks is high. Obviously you can be unlucky on the d-day but then anything can happen!!
b) The one thing that really makes the exam easy is that the number of correct answers is specified i.e. it will be mentioned that Choose 2 or Choose 3. So by the process of elimination, you can narrow down your choices. There were 2/3 places where I was not 100% sure whether a given option is correct or not but it was 'more correct' than the other ones for sure. That happened in some descriptive type of questions. So one should always use this thing to max advantage. Believe me, this one really works to our favor a lot.
c) If you are not comfortable with any topic then you can mark them as not attempted initially and then attempt them in the end. Because if you try to go for them in the beginning and get confused then it can affect your other answers. You can be tensed also. So attempt those first which are cakewalks for you. It is not an adaptive
test. So you can come back to the same question again n times. Generally all the questions are grouped by the topic like GC, threading etc.
d) Threading questions (about 10) are the most trickier ones. At least I found them or may be I'm weak at them :-). So practice threads stuff more.
e) The software complains if you choose more number of correct answers but lets you switch to the next question if you choose less. For e.g., if there are 3 correct answers and you choose only 2 then it will let you do it. So be careful about this.
I hope what I wrote above is helpful to atleast few of you and is not a complete piece of garbage to be collected later by GC (can't say for sure :-))
Good luck,
Deep
