Marc, you are absolutely correct about what any individual exam taker would see on the exam, but Bert and I know the scope of the *entire* exam... in other words, we know the explicit ways in which the objectives have been interpreted, and we're trying to help make sure people do not spend TOO much time going down roads that are not a productive use of brain power or time because we (Sun/exam developers) have decided that it is not reasonable to expect programmers at the SCJP level to have memorized those things...
But you're absolutely right about people taking the exam Marc. And besides, people cannot remember exactly what is on the exam. I have seen people write letters complaining that they got a question on "XYZ", and they were absolutely certain, but when I pulled up their exam, and in fact searched through ever question in the exam database, there were no questions of that type... so, memory is a tricky thing
So just because someone says, "I HAD no questions on bit shifting" in no way means that someone else won't. (Although that's a bad example, because you can ALL count on having questions on bit shifting
)
What IS guaranteed is that all versions of the exam have been ranked absolutely equal in terms of the weighting of the objectives and the difficult level of the exam. Each person may have different questions on a given objective, but everyone has questions on that objective. They just mght have *different* questions related to that objective. And everyone takes an exam that has been tested to have the same difficult level as every other version of the exam. There is no one *killer* version while someone else gets *the easy one*
cheers,
Kathy