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Passed the Oracle 1Z0-803 OCA exam

 
Greenhorn
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I passed the Oracle 1Z0-803 OCA exam today with a 63%. By 1% point, lol. I left feeling really bad, as I had time management issues since I am a slow test taker, but then I received the good news e-mail.

I used the Mala Gupta, Liguori & Finegan, and Sierra & Bates books. I have not touched the L&F book for a while, but was getting an 85% on its practice tests several months ago, so it will NOT be enough. Next I went to the Gupta book, which is the go to book to buy. I received an 85% on the Gupta test about 6 weeks ago. In between, I was taking Whizlabs, Enthuware, and Trancender practice tests. I was getting in the low 70s for Whizlabs and Transcender. I also used the Jonathan Middaugh sample question Kindle App. (If anyone is interested, I can give an in depth review on these training tools as I don't see many current reviews outside of Enthuware since the exam moved from Sun to Oracle. )

I only bought the S&B book a couple of weeks ago, so I did not study it much. It seems like there is not as much depth and examples as Gupta as the chapters are shorter, but the end of chapter and exam questions were really hard. It also has updates that reflect recent changes, that happened after Gupta was published. It's a heavy hardcover book that also covers 1Z0-804, and has much of the same humor as their HeadFirst book. I would recommend it next to the Gupta book and Enthuware exams for study.

Of course, Enthuware is the most popular test suite. In the past, I noticed that people have reported a 10 - 20% better grade on the real exam compared to Enthware, but not sure if that is the case anymore. My scores were not that great, so the last couple of weeks before the exam, I studied the Leitner mode which helped. My Last Day test was a 64% from a couple of weeks ago. I continued with the Leitner mode and took the S&B book exam, which I scored a 59% a couple of days before the real exam. (I only took the 1st sample test.) Bottom line is that you will need to give yourself some passing grade buffer, as most practice exams may not have a high enough level of difficulty.

Enthuware: (most taken a couple of months ago):
Test 1: 61%
Test 2: 53%
Test 3: 43% (not sure what happened here)
Test 4: 59%
Test 5: 57%
Test 6: 57%
Last Day: 64%



 
Enthuware Software Support
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Congratulations on passing and glad to know our s/w was helpful in your preparation.
You have gone through a lot of training material. How long did it take?
 
Ranch Hand
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Congratulations! Don't feel bad. You studied and you passed the test. This test can really take up lots of time and cause lots of stress. Just think, you can move on to other things now and put this behind you. Good job!
 
Brian Mackin
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Per the question about prep time, I would estimate I spent 600+ hours total. This is not just study time, but includes a class at New Horizons and dabbling in Selenium Webdriver for my new job and building Android apps . Though I'm guessing several hundred hours in study itself. It had been 15 years since I programmed in Fortran and Matlab, so I had to relearn programming. The OOP concepts were new to me and where I struggled most. I was out of work until recently, as my last job was outsourced to India, so the US has a Trade Adjustment Act (TAA) for free re-education for those whose jobs were outsourced overseas. TAA even pays for the cert voucher, though not exam guides and sample tests.
 
Greenhorn
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Congratulations!

I passed mine on the 6th! - with a score of 63%. was nevous as 56 minutes in, with 01:04 on the clock the terminal froze up for several minutes, putting me behind schedule for my answers & resulting in me rushing the 2nd half. - when I came out the receptionist said she was raising an incident report. "Great" I thought as I was quite unsure if I'd passed. when I got the email to say I had, I was muchos happy.

Now for the next one....... Although I think I'll wait til after xmas before I even look at it.
 
Greenhorn
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Took OCA exam yesterday and it was much harder than I expected. Questions with many lines of code, ran out of time and had to guess on at least 5. Multiple Classes, multiple methods, multiple Objects and a Loop to change values. Enthuware practice exam results were: 47, 54, 50, 60, 51, 59, 63. My test score was 68%, so I passed. My experience in OOP and Java is 2 online courses, so maybe that lack of real-life experience made it difficult to digest the code.

The following 3 examples are what at least 50 of the questions are like:

----------------------------------------------------
Consider the following code:

What can be done to improve the encapsulation of this class?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Consider the following code:


Which of the following options can be used in the code above so that the init method initializes each table element to the sum of its row and column number and the multiply method just multiplies the element value by 2?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
and
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Given:



What is the output?
-------------------------------------------------------------
 
Ranch Hand
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You pass and this is mater. most probably you must work with topic that you see in result before you make next step ocjp. Ocjp is harder that oca and you can't afford lost point from concept that OCA. your study just start don't relax just give more time for preparation next time
 
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if you refer the link http://learncertification.com/coursedetails/29/Oracle-Certified-Associate--Java-SE-Programmer-1Z0-803 you can get free study materials and many online practice tests
 
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