Cleared SCJP. 85%.

Darren Song

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posted 11 years ago

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Hi, I just passed the SCJP exam today with a safe score of 85%.
I thought I would post my mock exam scores for you to compare with yours and predict how well you could do on the actual exam.

Preparation:

I studied for a total of 21 days.
I only coded for fun before and I was new to the most of java features(Thread, Generics, Collections other than ArrayList, and so on) in the objectives.

I read through K&B book but I kept losing my concentration when I was reading on concurrency and generics, I only went back to these topics when I missed a question in these areas.

For last 7 days since I had a full week off, I took 2-3 mocks a day.
Exam Lab and K&B Practice Exams were too hard for me. The codes were too long and it tried to test me on too many objectives at a time; I constantly lost my concentration on these exams and gave up.

Here are my mock exam scores:

1. Exam Lab Diagnostic Exam: 30% FAIL
2. K&B Practice Exam Book Exam 1: 34% FAIL
3. Enthuware Standard Test 1: 52% FAIL
4. Enthuware Standard Test 2: 63% PASS
5. Enthuware Standard Test 3: 65% PASS
6. Enthuware Standard Test 4: 65% PASS
7. Enthuware Standard Test 5: 65% PASS
8. Enthuware Standard Test 6: 55% FAIL
9. Enthuware Standard Test 7: 55% FAIL
10. Enthuware Standard Test 8: 55% FAIL
11. Enthuware Standard Test 9: 73% PASS
12. Enthuware Standard Test 10: 62% PASS
13. Exam Lab Practice Exam 1: 36% Fail
14. Enthuware Standard Test 11: 63% PASS
15. Enthuware Standard Test 12: 62% PASS
16. Enthuware Last Day Test: 72% PASS

Actual Exam:

I was in a panic mode when the testing center told me they only provide one plastic paper and a marker.

But I actually used them for only 1 question, which turned out the answer was compilation failure (/facepalm)
I used the rest of the space to count how many questions I think I got right(lol).

I wanted to read through the two minute summaries before the test but I was too nervous and never was able to.
So if you are trying to cram right before test, it won't work! Don't do it!

The exam was actually pretty easy even for me. The questions were straight forward and I could see what they were testing on me.
The score I guessed that I would get while testing was very close to what I got actually.

They only asked very basic questions on concurrency and collections. So if you are not doing well on these parts, do not be too afraid.
Like someone said in this forum before, SCJP isn't some kind of horror!

I have less than 40% on both collections and concurrency on Enthuware progress report (:P)

I noticed there were 3 sets of 2 questions which used the same code with just a little changes like public access to private access.

One more thing, I didn't see any drag and drops nor serialization questions but I did see wait(), notify(), and notifyAll() in one of the questions.
The question had them in the choices. So, at least, know what they are!

What now?!:

I ran straight to the Barnes and Noble after the exam and bought myself a copy of HF Servlet and JSP. My plan is to attempt WCD within a month.