Hello Dear Ranchers,
After one month of rigorous preparation, today i cleared
SCJP 5.0 with 91%. The score was way below my expectations and i was very much disappointed when i came to know the score. But i think that is what i deserve.
Anyways this is really a some sort of success and this has definitely boosted some confidence in me.
I would like suggest something here, more on a stupid thing i did in the exam. Try to finish exam as early as possible and spend some time on reviewing all the questions. You might have overlooked something in the first pass, which you can correct in the second pass. I thought i have lot of time and i started solving the questions so slowly (than necessary) that i had only 20 minutes left by the time i answered 72nd question. So, in fact i didn't review any question i answered in my first pass. And when i see my score card, i feel i might have done some silly mistakes over easy questions:
My score :
Declarations, initialization and scoping - 100%
Flow Control - 90%
API Contents - 100%
Concurrency - 62% 
OO Concepts - 80%
Collections/Generics - 100%
Fundamentals - 100% I prepared only with K&B book and i would like to thank Kathy and Bert for such a wonderful and lively book. I would strongly recommend this book for SCJP aspirants.
Also i would like to thank all of you who helped me to clear all my doubts. I have really learned many new things on this forum I practiced with Whizlabs product. But unfortunately i had only last 4 days left to practice, and could not finish all the tests. With my hectic work and being on production support 24/7 with pager in my hand all the time, it was really difficult to concentrate on my preparation (BTW i work for an MNC in US (worked only 2years in
Java that too Java 1.4)). I'm really glad that it's all over now.
I would suggest that practice as much as possible and try to study all the APIs well (Related to Generics, File IO,
String etc.). Of course with all the new IDEs we use in our projects we don't have to remember all the APIs but unfortunately for the exam you need to know them.
You should be aware which classes have what methods (For eg: i was not aware that even StringBuffer has substring() method.
i thought only String class has it.). And lastly the real exam is not as tough as mock exams (of K&B and Whizlabs). I would say that with 2 months of dedicated preparation one can easily score close to 100%, if not 100%.
I still remember my
first message i posted 2 years back when i started learning Java and it took quite some time for me to understand reference type casting. At that time i didn't even have the knowledge of OOP concepts and i had not studied any good Java book. And then i was busy with my regular job and didn't visit this forum. After my first 4 posts i visited this forum after two years when i decided to take SCJP 5.0 on Sep 28th. Immediately i bought K&B book and started studying it whenever i had time, and i used visit this forum regularly. I already knew few concepts of Java 5.0 so it was not very difficult to prepare for the exam and the book is really marvelous.
After spending one month on this forum i would really like to keep visiting this forum often.
Once again Thank you all!!!
so don't be disappointed...
