Thoughts about duration & number of questions changes in OCAJP7 exam!

[K. Tsang]

This topic announces changes in exam details.

Roel De Nijs wrote:Duration: 120 minutes
Number of Questions: 70

Hmm don't know if this is a good or bad thing.

[gabriele mannocci]

It's a bad thing!!
With previous version I usually did 90% and today morning with my surprise I had to do new verson! In my opinion it's more difficult and there isn't enough time to do that...

[Andrew Remil]

gabriele mannocci wrote:It's a bad thing!!
With previous version I usually did 90% and today morning with my surprise I had to do new verson! In my opinion it's more difficult and there isn't enough time to do that...

Hello! Where did you get a new version? I just prepared for this exam, because last week I didn't pass this exam.

[Roel De Nijs]

gabriele mannocci wrote:It's a bad thing!!

First of all a warm welcome to the CodeRanch!

Honestly I don't agree. I was really not happy when they changed the passing score from 77% to only 63%. Such a change makes the certification less valuable. This certification exam is about the sheer basics of the Java language, so a very good understanding is required. If have a good solid knowledge about the topics, this change should not make any difference at all. The average time you have per question was 100 seconds, now it is 102.85 seconds. So you even have a little bit more time per question.

[Roel De Nijs]

Andrew Remil wrote:Where did you get a new version?

First of all a warm welcome to the CodeRanch!

Have a look at this topic. It keeps track of all changes in the OCAJP7 certification exam for everyone's convenience.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I like it. It is harder to stay focused during a longer exam.

[gabriele mannocci]

You're right Roel..but even if you have the same time more or less, i found questions a little more complex. After all, if the passing score now it's lower means somenthing.

[Roel De Nijs]

gabriele mannocci wrote:i found questions a little more complex. After all, if the passing score now it's lower means somenthing.

The passing score was already decreased in the beginning of this year. This time only the number of questions and the duration were changed.

[K. Tsang]

The recent change doesn't necessarily make it the exam is more difficult or easier ... because the minute-to-question ratio is about the same as Roel mentioned in earlier post.

Yet shorter duration does allow candidates to focus more like what Jeanne mentioned.

[Peter Cong]

Roel De Nijs wrote:

gabriele mannocci wrote:It's a bad thing!!

First of all a warm welcome to the CodeRanch!

Honestly I don't agree. I was really not happy when they changed the passing score from 77% to only 63%. Such a change makes the certification less valuable. This certification exam is about the sheer basics of the Java language, so a very good understanding is required. If have a good solid knowledge about the topics, this change should not make any difference at all. The average time you have per question was 100 seconds, now it is 102.85 seconds. So you even have a little bit more time per questi
on.

The shorter time with the tough questions means more difficulty than the provious version, I just failed the exam, I found the 70 questions are much difficulty than before, no sure how many people will pass it. even make the questions to 30, but more diffulty question, it is still meaning nothing for the time. So the bottom line is the diffulty for each question,
Can anybody who passed the new updated (1Z0-803) exam (70 questions) share some experience with us?

[Peter Cong]

Roel De Nijs wrote:

gabriele mannocci wrote:i found questions a little more complex. After all, if the passing score now it's lower means somenthing.

The passing score was already decreased in the beginning of this year. This time only the number of questions and the duration were changed.

I think these new 70 questions are more dificulty than before, you can not even finish them in the given time in the exam.

[gabriele mannocci]

Hi Peter,
in fact I left 7-8 questions incomplete....Fortunally, I passed the exam with 65% but i guarantee i was all times around 92% with the old way...

[Peter Cong]

gabriele mannocci wrote:Hi Peter,
in fact I left 7-8 questions incomplete....Fortunally, I passed the exam with 65% but i guarantee i was all times around 92% with the old way...

Congratulation you passed the exam, but I failed, can we share the experiene with you how to pass it? I have to prepare it and try it next time. thanks

[Sergej Smoljanov]

gabriele mannocci what materials you use to prepare? What was you experience in java?

Peter Cong how long was your preparation? (now i prepare and want know how many i must do before go to exam)

[Roel De Nijs]

Peter Cong wrote:I think these new 70 questions are more dificulty than before, you can not even finish them in the given time in the exam.

Did you already take the exam before this recent change? Or what's the basis for your conclusion?

[Roel De Nijs]

Sergej Smoljanov wrote:gabriele mannocci what materials you use to prepare?

You'll find a bunch of materials and resources in the OcajpFaq. At this moment the Mala Gupta book and the Enthuware mock exams are the most popular study materials.

[Peter Cong]

Roel De Nijs wrote:

Peter Cong wrote:I think these new 70 questions are more dificulty than before, you can not even finish them in the given time in the exam.

Did you already take the exam before this recent change? Or what's the basis for your conclusion?

Yes, I took the exam a week ago, and it was failed, that was my first exam with 70 questions, I have never taken any exam before. I practice some mock exams from internet with 90 questions, but not help too much.
I appreciate if you can give me some suggestions , resouces and materials in order to pass the new updated exam which is 70 question. thanks in advance.

[Roel De Nijs]

Peter Cong wrote:Yes, I took the exam a week ago, and it was failed, that was my first exam with 70 questions, I have never taken any exam before. I practice some mock exams from internet with 90 questions, but not help too much.

So your sole preparation was taking a mock exam on the internet

Peter Cong wrote:I appreciate if you can give me some suggestions , resouces and materials in order to pass the new updated exam which is 70 question. thanks in advance.

The study materials and resources mentioned in the OcajpFaq are still valid. The decrease in the number of questions doesn't mean things you need to know for the exam have changed. And most of the books cover a little more than strictly required to foresee little exam changes.

[gabriele mannocci]

Sergej Smoljanov wrote:gabriele mannocci what materials you use to prepare? What was you experience in java?

I've been working as a java EE developer since 2010. First of it, I studied Java at University.
I think the best book is Mala Gupta. Roberto Liguori's book is not enough.

[Gomathi Sankar Arumugam]

I've passed OCAJP 7, on 12-July-14.
Refer my post on exam experience: Link

[Roel De Nijs]

Another very small (negligible) implication of this change. You are allowed to make fewer mistakes.

90 questions

# correct answers: 57 (63.33%)

# allowed mistakes: 33 (36.67%)

70 questions

# correct answers: 45 (64.29%)

# allowed mistakes: 25 (35.71%)

So a very slight difference of .96%

[Satya D Prasad]

Folks,

To those who have given the OCAJP 7 with 70 questions pattern, please let us know the overall difficulty of it.

[Guillermo Ishi]

Satya D Prasad wrote:Folks,

To those who have given the OCAJP 7 with 70 questions pattern, please let us know the overall difficulty of it.

I have the distinction of having flunked the new exam as well as the old one. I think new one is much more difficult than the previous one. In the new exam almost every question involved unravelling so much spaghetti that you may never get to the Java aspect of the question. There are very few of the short questions that simply test your knowledge of Java as there were on the previous exam. You have to stand on your head and do a dance and if you can pass that, then you have the chance to demonstrate your Java knowledge. I think I could pass it if it was a four hour exam with a break in the middle. I marked anything for the last ten questions or so as I ran out of time.

I prepared for a second shot at the old exam obviously, and I think if I had been given that exam I would have passed it in the 80s or better. I got 60% on the new one. I would have guessed I got about 30% on it so I wonder if the 60% is a made-up score designed to entice me to take (pay for) the exam again. I think the mock tests will have to change some for them to be as effective as they were. The big difference is the old exam has a lot of short questions that test your Java directly, while the new exam has a lot of questions a lot like the hardest current mock questions you'll see, and some harder still. And by harder, I just mean hacking through that spaghetti. I wondered if Oracle was trying to shut off all new certifications without shutting off the test fee income.

[Tiberius Marius]

I plan to take the exam in 2-3 weeks , you officially scared me What mock exam tests did you use ?

How are those questions compared to the ones at the exam ?

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=303&p_certName=SQ1Z0_803

[Satya D Prasad]

I agree with your concern. I gave the exam last Tuesday , 22 July 2014 and passed it with 81%. The real exam is a little more tougher than what we saw in mocks. Adding to it was the nervousness of the exam. If people get used to 70 questions pattern in mock exams, I believe, they will find it easier and score more on it. Don't worry concept is the same anyway

[Guillermo Ishi]

Tiberius, the average real question is slightly harder than that. The hardest real questions are like if you combined two of those together somehow. Regarding mocks, I'd suggest using one product for learning and another exclusively for checking your progress. The best check would be completely new in content and style and typeface. I would also concentrate on answering the mock tests with as much time left over as possible to help insure you don't run out of time on the real one. Speed through it in other words.

Satya, my hat's off to you!

[Guillermo Ishi]

Roel De Nijs wrote:

Peter Cong wrote:I think these new 70 questions are more dificulty than before, you can not even finish them in the given time in the exam.

Did you already take the exam before this recent change? Or what's the basis for your conclusion?

I didn't read more than the last couple of responses yesterday. I have taken both exams and concur with Peter and Gabriele. The first test, I was going to be a hot shot and not study for it, so I didn't pass. For the second test, I prepared very diligently for the first test I got 60% on the new test to Gabriele's 65%, she was getting 90s on the practice tests and I was getting 80s, she didn't have time to answer eight questions and I didn't have time to answer about ten. I don't feel as bad now considering she's been a Java developer for four years and studied Java in college. I wish I had come here before and read that people were having trouble getting finished. I might have paced myself differently.

P.S. I also concur with her that there were some very time consuming questions up front, which was discouraging. Later there seems to be brief pockets of easier questions like the old questions, but they don't last.

[Roel De Nijs]

First of all, this topic seems to be a very hot topic these days and lots of candidates are worried, scared,... about the new format with 70 questions. So that's why I made this topic sticky, so we can gather as much experiences as possible to be able to settle down or get even worried, scared,... a little bit more

I don't have any experience with the old or the new exam, I didn't take the OCAJP7 yet (but in the past I have already passed a few other certified java programmer exams). So my opinion is based on my previous experiences and not the actual exam. I'm still convinced that someone who is well-prepared can and will pass this exam at the 1st shot. I see a trend of people wanting to get that piece of paper as soons as possible, these people might perhaps struggle to pass this exam. And I think that's a good thing! On the one hand because it makes this certification harder to get and thus a (little) more "valuable". On the other hand a certification is much more than just that piece of paper. Because you need to prepare more and harder, in the end you'll definitely be a better developer with a good/excellent understanding of the java basics. And that's something you can show off on a job interview, and that will impress the recruiter much more than that 1 line on your cv.

Also note that this certification is also an entry-level certification. So you should have a very good (maybe even excellent) understanding about the ins and outs of the java basics. At a glance you should spot if a method is a valid overload/override or not, it can't take 15 seconds to decide. Can I access a protected method from the base (parent) class in a sub (derived) class which resides in another package than its base class or do some limitations apply? How does a valid switch statement look like, which variable types can I use in the expression and which are valid values for the case labels? It should become almost a reflex to answer these questions. And that brings us back to the solid and in-depth preparation. The circle is complete

[Roel De Nijs]

Guillermo Ishi wrote:P.S. I also concur with her that there were some very time consuming questions up front, which was discouraging. Later there seems to be brief pockets of easier questions like the old questions, but they don't last.

But maybe they (or 1-2) looked to you as very time consuming questions, but were actually very easy if you spotted the invalid overload/override or the variable which was used out of its scope or ... I don't say that was the case. I just want to share my experiences (and I have a few, although not with this exam). I also spent on a few occasions 30 seconds on a question working out some complex iteration logic, before spotting some compiler issue (variable out of scope, incorrect syntax,...) and then I just have 1 thing in my mind (after selecting the "Compilation fails" option): "oh no, my precious, my precious time"

[Jeffrey Jackson]

I took and passed the exam yesterday and posted some feedback that should help with the concerns presented in this thread. I, too, was nervous about time after reading your posts, but it went well overall. Here is my detailed feedback:
https://coderanch.com/t/637747/ocajp/certification/thoughts-today-OCAJP-Exam-Passed

GOOD LUCK!

[Roel De Nijs]

Here you'll find another experience of a rancher who aced the "new style" OCAJP7 exam.

Good luck to everybody!

[Paul Anilprem]

We have posted some first hand experience of our instructors about the updated exam on our site.

The exam already had a lot of questions that require you to read a piece of code and figure out what it does. There is no change in that. However, code fragments of some of the questions are now a bit longer. You will see about 10-15 questions with code spanning more than 20 lines but less than 25. The length of the code does not necessarily make them tougher but because it takes longer to just go through the whole code, that creates time pressure. The code snippets are well formatted and easy to read though.

You will find ambiguous questions and questions that have errors. For example, you may see questions on benefits of ArrayList over an array that require you to know whether an ArrayList consumes more or less memory than an array. There are questions with obvious compilation errors but do not have "Will not compile" as an option. There are questions that might be considered entirely out of syllabus. For example, you might see a reference to SQLException in a question or an option. A detailed knowledge of SQLException is not required to answer the such questions but you need to know that java.sql.SQLException is a checked exception. Same goes for java.io.IOException and java.io.FileNotFoundException.

The exam seems to contain questions distributed unevenly among exam objectives. You will get a lot of questions on loops and arrays. But the good thing is that they are not difficult...only time consuming. A worksheet would be very helpful in working out the loop variables to arrive at the answer.

Garbage collection has now been included in official exam objectives. However, only very few test takers have claimed to see one question on it.

Some candidates have reported getting questions that contained Integer wrapper class although the questions were not directly related to wrapper classes. No inner classes.

Overall, the exam has gotten a little tougher but only because of the time factor. The content is easy but you need to be able to work out the code faster otherwise you may run out of time.

We have updated our question bank to incorporate all these changes. You will build up the necessary speed by practising with our mock exams.

[Sergej Smoljanov]

We have updated our question bank to incorporate all these changes.

good news.i think it is excellent !

[Silviu Burcea]

I have used Enthuware tests to pass the new OCAJP 7 exam with 93%. I have had a 100 questions / hour pace while taking the preparation tests. I haven't checked my answers because I wanted to see what kind of questions tricked me the most. In the real exam, I had to pay more attention, so I have ended up with 60 questions / hour. This gave me enough time to check my answers. With only 10$, Enthuware was the best resource to learn from. I have also used K&B SCJP 6 book before starting the Enthuware tests, you may want to search for a Java SE7 book. Oh, and my main goal was to get 100%, never aim for the passing score, always aim higher! Good luck guys!

[Roel De Nijs]

Here is yet another experience of a rancher who aced the "new style" OCAJP7 exam.

Good luck to everybody!