SCJP 6 Results

[Tim Jameson]

Well I just finished taking the exam today.
Ended up rescheduling it since the practice tests blew my mind.
I gave myself another 3 weeks of hard studying.
I re-read the book, actually taking notes this time round.

My final score was a 59% which means I failed it.
After reviewing my printout, it looks like I did pretty well in everything except fundamentals!
I went into the test scoring 75% on most the practice exams so I was quite surprised.

As far as the version 6 in comparison to the practice exams I thought it was a much fairer go.
No 20-30 line tangled up code to spend 2 minutes unwinding.
Most the questions I felt confident that I knew what the question was testing me after catching their subtle mistakes.
Then again I didn't pass it so maybe I'm wrong.
Even the ones that put me on the fence I came home and compiled them just to find out I marked the correct answer.
I don't quite know what fundamental stuff I messed up?
Anyways, just thought I'd share. Probably not going to try again this year since it costs so much.
Maybe next year.

[Morteza Manavi-Parast]

Thanks for sharing your experience with us. And I am sorry you couldn't make it. I am sure you will kick it next time pretty well.

Well, I guess I have the same situation like you, I am going to write my exam next week and now I see that I have my lowest score on fundamentals just like you.
Now I wonder if I should reschedule my exam or not. Can you please let me know if you did some mocks like Master Exam or Devaka exam lab and if so, what was your scores on those mocks right before taking the exam? In addition, how did you find the real exam compare to mock test, in terms of difficulty?

[Tim Jameson]

I did Devaka and thought it was considerably more challenging.
However, it does provide a very realistic environment.
I only worked half of Devaka and I think some of the questions had so much going on I almost missed the reasoning to some solutions entirely. The style and environment is very similar to the real exam I took.

The other thing I really liked about the real exam is it seemed to isolate code better. It was easier to focus on smaller chunks of code.

The one big disappointment for me was that I spent a whole lot of time memorizing and mastering collections and generics but didn't seem to get many of those on the exam. The ones I did have were very basic.

I didn't have a problem with concurrency either. If you read the Sierra Bates version 6 study guide then you should be fine if you get basic questions like I did.

The part that did irritate a me on the real exam was seeing so many primitives, wrappers, (and their methods) and strange arithmetic operations combined. A lot of times i was left wondering why I never considered such combinations before.

I did indeed work the Master Exam. I would work 35 questions at a time since for some reason the cd only gave me an hour and a half. My first time I scored a 39% but after reading the book again and working some mocks on this site I went back and repeatedly got scores in the 70's.

Hope that helps. I could tell a little more but I don't want to cross the line. Good luck. Hope it goes better for you.


and as one last tip.
Be sure to post your results in the appropriate forum!
Sorry. I just saw the link.
https://coderanch.com/forums/f-44/Sun-Certification-Results

[Ankit Garg]

Tim it feels really bad to listen that someone has failed in SCJP exam. I can only say that you prepare this time harder and give as many mock exams as you can and also create example programs for yourself. I think that you'll come out with flying colors this time around