Anyone done SCJP 1.4 Beta , please comment~ :)

[Mark Spritzler]

Sean -

What type of questions were there regarding
Collections Framework and Wrapper Classes?

The basic questions that you would see in the SCJP 1.3 version. Actualyl I think a little less on these questions. I remember my original exam having many questions on this area, and I found the same if not less in this one.
Same for Wrapper classes, you need to know how to convert from primitive to Wrapper and the other way around.
Mark

[Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi]

After you take the beta how long do you have to wait until you know if you passed or not?

[Himanshu Jhamb]

Hi All.
Just came back about 3 hours ago from the Beta exam. Needless to say, my brain is fried.
Its a long test. 4 hours, 161 Questions.
Here's my experience.
Found the exam to be quite tedious. Maybe it was because my exam started off with 10 GC Qs, 15-20 Thread Qs. Most of these Questions were Code Questions.
Thats a lethal combo for a person like me. I am a but weak on these two areas as compared to the rest ... so I took time to do these... but was shocked to see my clock showing 2 and a half hours remaining & I had done only 35 Questions !!
Scampered through the rest of the test... managed to finish the test... & am sure would have screwed up a few along the way because of that.
One piece of advice... Attempt the strongest Questions first, so that you have plenty of time left at the end and less number of Questions remaining. That way, you ensure that you don't miss on any of your stronger ones ! Had I done that, would have been expecting more than 90% !
But, I think I might be somewhere near 75%-85% mark.
In general, very few Questions on casting/conversions.
A lot of Questions on Threads & GC.
Not many on java.util & all of them were pretty much the same as on the original exam. (level of difficulty-wise).
6-7 Qs on Assertions. Relatively easy. Testing concepts of Assertions.
A lot of code Questions on postfix and prefix ++ & --
Not too many inner class Qs.
I think that about sums it up from my side.
Good luck all

[sean cee]

Himanshu,
Thanks for you posting.
I think I am starting to get an idea as to what
the exam is like..
Ibrahim,
The exam result will be out in 6-8 weeks.
Thanks all
Sean

[sean cee]

Thanks Mark for you feedback as well

[Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi]

Sean
I thought i had heard 6-8 weeks but I wasn't sure. Thanks for clearing that up.

[Mark Fletcher]

I sat the 1.4 exam yesterday. There are a lot of thread questions, be warned Id say about 15-20. Also noticed a couple of mistakes in the questions as well.
Anyone else notice mistakes in the questions? I got one where a try - catch structure was listed as try - atch.
Cheers,
Mark

[Himanshu Jhamb]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that !
There were a ton of mistakes. Thats one more thing that ate up my time. I, like a good soul (and an idiot!), sat down to write detailed comments on wrongly worded questions...
I remember one with two methods... one method contained a loop with local variable & the same local variable was used in the other method (no declaration of this local variable, there). But, alas... there was no choice which said "Compilation would fail".
So, yeah, quite a few wrong questions... but then, its a beta exam, maybe thats the reason they are giving this exam in the beta phase. What better than to have a bunch of java looneys take a shot at wrongly worder questions !
Cheers

[sean cee]

Hi guys,
Were there any ThreadGroup related questions?
thanks in advance.

[Himanshu Jhamb]

No. None, in my case.

[Ryan Bailey]

Wish me luck I take mine tomorrow(The 16th)
I've been preparing for this for a long time and feel pretty confident.

[sean cee]

Good Luck Ryan,
and make sure you come back and post some comments please.
I take mine on 17th morning...
ta.

[Rob Ross]

Yup, I take mine on the 17th too.

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

161 questions in four hours is a lot. Consider that the regular exam is 59 questions in two hours.

[Rasri Anand]

Hi all,
It was my turn today to take the exam.
I found that 4 hrs were NOT sufficient enough for me to do justice to all the 161 questions.
I took time to double check each of the questions initially even the simpler ones ( and this probably cost me some time) therefore, by the time I reached the last 20-30 questions, I had to rush through.
These last few questions were all to do with "Threads" and "GC", and all were code intensive.
There were quite a few questions about String operations. Most to do with the immutable nature of Strings. And at least 7-8 questions dealt with POST-INCREMENT, PRE-INCREMENT operators. There were a few questions on the implementation of "hashCode" and "equals" methods.
The questions on assertions were quite simple and the material provided by SUN is more than enough.
I got atleast 5-6 questions on encapsulation. They were of the True or False type.
There was a question on LinkedHashSet. Rest were more to do with the hierarchy.
If I remember anything else important I will post the same. The exam was exhausting to say the least.

[vinita Kh]

Hi Guys,
does beta test yesterday!
For me it was a surprize the the test was 161 questions & 3 hrs only!!, though sun has mentioned it would be for 4 hours.
But nehow i had to manage with 3 hrs only.
I found the questions little bit difficult as compared to mocks even marcus Green.
I had scored above 80% in almost all the mocks i have given listed on maha_anna mock exams & Even in the rules-round up i use to score 100%,but i'm not satisfied with my performance in real test.
neways..
basic questions on assertion.
lot of questions on threads, & ++, --, Wrapper class, have a look at general methods of Wrapper class, what they return & what they take as parameter.
Read from JLS what exactly equals() does in all the class which override it.
A lot of questions on Collection framwork
only a few questions on inner classes
prepare interfaces very well, differentiate between is-a and has-a
Operator precendence
......i think thats it from my side.

This was my first experience for any certification exam!, though very bad too.
At the first place when i went for the test, i was informed that i have been registered for exam & given SP code from sun, but my exam is not available.
once they managed to get the exam from sun,& i started with.After just 1/2 hr date on the PC changed & it gave message saying, ur session is expired!
This happened 3-4 times.
At last i was shifted to a different PC then i could finish it.
so overall it took 8 hrs for me!!
neways..
All the best to all who r yet to appear.
Vinita

[Mathew Sam]

Today i took the Beta.
161 questions ....... 4 hours ..... too much for my brain.
Most of the questions were good. but some of them had typos, missing semicolons etc .And two questions had options saying compile time error where they missed semicolon.I really doubt whether they check us on semicolons.
Good number of questions on threads,garbage collection,loops,Wrapper classes,Strings.
I found questions from garbage collections very difficult.
Can anybody suggest some links which explains about garbage collection.If object A is having a reference of B, will B be garbage collected when A is garbage collected ? I need this sort of discussions.

Sam

[Ryan Bailey]

Ok, so here is a silly question.
What happends if the code is missing a semicolon in the test. Should a not choose any answers and scribble down on the comments that the code will not compile? How are they going to grade these fairly if the code isn't even written right??
I'm a littl bummed about that. Quick replys greatly appriciated. I take my test TODAY!!
Study study study

[Syed AliRaza Zaidi]

Hi Ranchers,
I gave my SCJP1.4 Beta Today Exam was extremly easy only checking basics about question pattern is following
I got
20 ques from Threads
17 Array
11 Anonymous and Inner classes
05 Assertion
00 IO
00 AWT
00 Events
30/31 ++,--
10/15 Garbbage Collection
02 Primitive type
01 Casting
02 Identifiers
10 Overriding
05 Overloading
and so on..............
Exam is not really much diffficult but has many errors like ; missing and asking which of these would compile threee correct answers and asking for two or two correct and required three u need to mention it there in comments.
There are lot of compile time error questions and also command line aurgument.
Expecting aroun 95%+ pray for me.

[shailesh sonavadekar]

vinita , you can metion this descripancy to Evelyn Thompson of sun educational services who incidentely has announced the beta test here only. her mail address is [e-mail].

one more thing. The Prometric test center people are capable of increasing the duration of the test. the administrator of the test ceter can do that by contacting regional prometric center head office. in case of india , it is at delhi.
i hope this helps.
Regards.

[shailesh sonavadekar]

since , this is beta test, there can be mistakes in the question. that you will have to mention in the comments on the test question.
there may be a possibility that you may get question from i/o or awt , even though they are not in exam objectives.
4 hrs. for 161 questions seems to be ok. at one time , there 120 questions to be answered in 90 minutes when scjp exam was changed in october 4 , 2000. this is just for argument sake. everybody will differ on this. plus , people will definitely like to have more duration. isn't it ?
shailesh.

[Hussain]

When i read all these posts , i must say
"SCJP 1.4 is extremely meaningless to GIve"
"SCJP 1.4 is extremely meaningless to GIve"
"SCJP 1.4 is extremely meaningless to GIve"
"SCJP 1.4 is extremely meaningless to GIve"
"SCJP 1.4 is extremely meaningless to GIve"
Happy that i have not given

[Yvette Gonzalez]

I took the test yesterday and only had three hours to take it. Did others have the full four hours?

[Himanshu Jhamb]

I am afraid I don't agree with you Muhammed. Its really not all that meaningless if you consider what it is for.
Its a beta exam. Discrepancies are bound to be there, otherwise why would they call it Beta & why would they be giving out free vouchers for the Java community have a go at it. Yes, agreed, it is definitely irritating to have such a big test with errors in it, but then again, its a BETA !
For me, it served as a good revision of the fundamentals again... it was fundamentals revisited. It came as a surprise to me that I had forgotten a couple of things & learnt a couple new along the way. So, it was not a waste... really.
Of course, if the only thing I was going for was a certificate, I would have found the exam completely meaningless, as well... but then again, I already have the certificate...

[Ryan Bailey]

I'm taking the beta exam. Would anyone recommend me taking the 1.3 exam also. If I get a cert or not from 1.4? I just think it will be hard getting a 1.4 cert, depending on how they grade the exams. Plus, I like AWT and IO Stuff

[Kripal Singh]

How many questions were from Operators and Assignments sections especially
>> right shift
<< left shift
>>> right shift including negative bit

Thanks all for posting your valuable comments

[Sagar Salapaka]

Kripal:
There are very few questions on shift operations. I would say around 5. They are not very time consuming either.
For Gonzalez and Vinita:
My test also said 161 questions and 3 hours. I checked with the testing center person there after finishing 3/4th of the test :-). She called up and found out that there was something wrong with the setup and scheduled me for some other day. I just finished the exam yesterday with 4 hours of testing time.
Ryan:
I just thought that the 1.4 beta exam questions are definitely more harder and time consuming than the SCJP Java 2 I took couple of years ago.

[Narasimhan Sethuraman]

It is quite surprised. I took Beta 1.4 yesterday and for me the clock shows correct time (4 Hours)

[Toby Davis]

Finished the beta 1.4 this morning. A heavy concentration in Threads and GC, as many others earlier have been saying. You must understand GC and Threads extremely well - or if not, otherwise score lamost perfect on all the other areas.
Not as much on Collections as I thought (or hoped) there would be - maybe 6 at most. A few on hashcode().
Only one or two on bitwise shifting, to my surprise.
The entire first 15 were on Math methods (random, ceil, floor, etc).
Quite a few on String immutability, and equals() vs. ==, scattered throughout the test.
Not as many on assertions - some syntax, some conceptual. Maybe 5 total.
I think this test is a bit harder than Marcus Green's and about on-par with JQPlus.
Not much more to say, just wanted to throw this into the pot. Be prepared for brainburn, whether you know your Java or not.
--

[Hussain]

Sir , i think if u are free and u have loads and loads of time , then beta is ok!.
Well if someone is Preparing for An IBM exam , then its a full waste ....

hope u won't mind ....

[Manish Hatwalne]

Just came out of Beta 1.4, it's exhaustive, lengthy, and sort of tough. And even 4 hrs are not sufficient for 161 questions. I had to rush through last 10/15 Qs w/o thinking much and they happened to be Thread/GC Qs with long codes. After 3 hrs, you really start loooking forward to the end of exam. Lots of long codes, lots of GC, Threads, Wrapper classes qestions. I had abt 7/8 Qs on collections. Tough!!!
I had booked my exam at 1 pm, but again the local prometric had some problem, so I waited and waited, and it started at 3 pm finally.
The exam had few incorrect Qs on Overriding, so I did put it in the comments. Also a few Qs on lang fundamentals were poorly worded. But overall, the standard of exam was quite good for a Beta exam.
Since this time it had 161 Qs they probably covered everyhing that you could think of on GC, Threads (few real tough ones), Collection (I didn't know a thing abt at least 2 Qs), surprisingly not much on Inner Classes. Then usual String immutability, object reference, pass by value stuff.
IMHO, for this beta exam they should have kept less qestions (around 120 - 125) for 4 hrs. Also, they should have declared while registering for the exam that the beta results would only indicate pass/fail, and the scores would not be disclosed, so that ppl actually "TEST" the exam and give them the required feedback by writing appropriate comments. That would have been more helpful for a beta exam, writing comments usually takes more time. Now, I believe many ppl would try to score in this beta exam, which might not help much in eliminating ambiguity, incorrectness from the exam. Well, just my thoughts..... Perhaps, Sun guys may have some purpose behind all this.
As for me, the experience of 4 hrs, 161 Qs exam was very satisfying, although it was very tiring. I don't want to take any Java related exam for next 6-8 months at least.
Good luck to all those who are abt. to take it in the next week (Well, I got the mail from Sun only today!! Had to take it today.)
- Manish

[Wei Du]

Just got of the 4 long hours of Beta test. Since I read the postings on this thread, there wasn't any big surprises. I want to comment on the number and difficulty of the GC questions.Believe me, they ARE time-consuming and hard. I just glanced over some of them and guessed, since I don't want to run out of time. I should point out, GC has been my weak area.
Overall, the questions were better than a typical mock exam. Some were very easy that takes < 5 seconds while others require the reading of a long code. You should try to average 1.5 questions/minutes. Don't spend too much time on the very unfamiliar ones, if you run out of time, you might miss some easy ones.
I finished the test with 3 minutes on the clock so I didn't have much time to double check.
I found 2 questions where it says to pick 3 (or 2) correct ones and I could only find 2 (or 1). I did comment on that.
Without AWT and I/O, the questions focused more on the core Java knowledge. Since I don't use AWT at work and I haven't spend any time studying it, I will definitely wait for the official 1.4 test if I fail the beta,

[agarwalsandeep]

How much are 1.4 features like logging APIs etc covered in the exam. Please let me know, I'm starting preps today to take it on 24th.
Thanks,
Sandeep

Originally posted by sean cee:
Hello,
I know there are some people who have done SCJP1.4
out there.
Please post some comments on it.
Thanks heaps

[Rob Ross]

There weren't any logging questions on my test. I don't believe they're part of the objectives at any rate.

Well I just got back from taking the test myself. Others have mentioned this already how draining this test can be, and I too feel very drained afterwards. It's amazing that so much concentration can actually exhaust a person, but it's true.
I think I did very well. The only weak point for me was assertions. I knew the syntax and grammar rules for them, but since I didn't play with them much before the test, I was a little unclear as to how to best use them. There were quite a few questions that asked "which is the best use of an assertion" and gave examples that seemed to me to all be syntactically correct. So I think they expect you to understand not just the syntax, but *why* and *where* you make best use of them. I guessed at about 4 of these questions.
Other than that, there were really no surprises. I previously had gone through the entire RHE book for Java 2 certification and was planning on going through Mughal as well, but when this 1.4 Beta came up I decided just to go for it. I reviewed the chapter tests for RHE in preparation, and re-read about half the book in areas I thought I was weaker in. Luckily I got to skip right over AWT and IO, which were pretty large chunks of information.
I'd say that RHE is still a good book for studying for 1.4; they'll have to revise it to add info about assertions, and maybe go into the Collections classes in a little more detail. But I found that RHE was still very applicible for studying for 1.4
Ok, I would break out the types of questions by topic, etc, but that has been done repeatedly already so I don't think it will add much to do it again.
I took the entire 4 hours; this included a 4 minute break to run to the bathroom (the test clock keeps ticking) and get a soda. I spent the first hour on 26 questions, and then realized I'd better get moving faster. I found it very helpful to use the Mark feature; I would quickly skim the question and if it was "easy" I would work on it, if it took more than a few seconds to understand what was being asked, I marked it. In this way I sped through the rest of the test, then had the last hour to go over the 30 or so questions that I had marked. I think the balance of time was fine, including time for me to add comments to various questions.
I only found 1 question that I didn't think I could answer. The sample code actually wouldn't compile because of a bug, but there was no answer that said "doesn't compile." So I wrote some comments about it.
There were a few other questions with some typos that seemed obvious so they didn't affect my ability to answer.
Well that's all I got for now. I'm going to take a nap or something...and NO JAVA STUDYING for a week. I'm taking a study vacation until I start my next cert
[ May 17, 2002: Message edited by: Rob Ross ]

[sean cee]

Hi all,
I finally had my beta exam on 17th morning.
I had none of the problems described by other ppl luckily.
I took mine at 8:50 am .. and I strongly recommend others to take theirs as early as possible.. that is if you can wake up and get there early.. this way you can concentrate better
and there will be less ppl around.
anyway.. the questions were same as others..
tons of GC , Thread related coding question no
thread group ..
Wrapper class related questions.
Maths methods...
It took me 3 and half hours to go through...
so don't spend too much time on one question..
especially GC and Thread related question..
they will come in one "batch" and it is best to
have them in the middle.. but I heard some ppl
saying they had to go thru GC/thread at the beginning and spent toooo much time and blah...
so when you see the GC and thread question then
time yourself wisely...
well that's it for me..
good luck everyone..