Pass OCA Java 8 1Z0-808 with 92%

[Aurelien Gamet]

Hello,

I passed the OCA Java 8 certification yesterday with 92% and I'm pretty happy about it (= since reading other's people experiences helped me to prepare, I'm gonna write my own there. Warning: I'm French! So like all French people my english kinda sucks. p:

First, I am 25 and I have a few years of experience with Java due to computer school + my work. I used Jeanne & Scott's book to study, and just after reading to first pages I decided I was actually pretty good at Java didn't need to read it. I know, totally mature reaction right ? I tried to take the first Sybex test to see if I was ready or not for the exam. It should be no surprise to anyone that took the exam that it beat the shit out of me (I got around 50%)! That hit my confidence level and I returned to the damn book.

So this is an advice: if you wanna pass the exam, even if you feel good about your current skills, buy a certification guide & read it.

I don't know about the other books, but Jeanne & Scott's is awesome! Even though I didn't read any other so I can't compare, I would still recommand it. The chapters are clear and very interesting, having an errata list online is a huge tell of integrity, and most importantly, the questions at the end of each chapters are perfect. They are kinda hard and push you to see if you really understood every concept or not. Careful, there are at least one answer that are wrong in my printed book, but if you use the errata list to check the things that seems weird that shouldn't be a problem.

I didn't record my results, but I had between 70% and 90% to all end-of-chapters test and Sybex test. So I was feeling pretty confident about the certification. Unfortunately, I couldn't try to pass it at that time because my enterprise was slow to deliver me the receipt to pass the exam; so I decided to try the Enthuware's mock exams, even though I felt I didn't really need it.

I think I wasn't wrong in that I would have passed without the enthuware mock exams, but I solidified a lot of my learnings due to it.

Here is a second advice: use mock exams if you are one of these two types: you wanna score a high grade OR you are new to Java. If you're not new to Java, you will probably pass just with the help of a guide, but you also probably won't score 90+%.

Again, the only mock exams I did were the Sybex' one that comes with Jeanne & Scott's book and Enthuware, so I can't compare to something else, but Enthuware's mock exams are cheap and super awesome. As said by many people before, the interface really looks like the real exam's one, and the questions & explanations are pretty great.

What is also pretty good about Enthuware's software is that he records all past attempts, so I have actually numbers to write. Here were my results:

Fundation test: 78%
Test 1: 84%
Test 2: 90%
Test 3: 87%
Test 4: 91%
Test 5: 88%
Test 6: 97%

Obviously after that last test I was feeling even more confident than before. I had to wait for one more week to receive my receipt + schedule my test.

Advice 3: if you use Enthuware's software, there is a feature to redo all questions that you missed and it's super awesome. What works best IMO is taking the test, then waiting one week so that you don't really remember the questions then go over all your questions that you missed and try to redo them again.

The day before the test (so the day before yesterday ^^), I took the "last day test" as well than the "most missed test". I scored:

Last day test: 95%
Most missed test: 80%

And so I went to the exam. I didn't visit it before 'cause a colleague passed her exam there and said that it was OK. And OK it was: very small and silent room. I was the only one, but the room could only take 4 people anyway, so it's not like it would have been super noisy even if full.

Anyway, NOW FOR THE REAL THING.
I found it quite easy. I'm actually a little disappointed with my score (92%). Now I know I'm a confident person, but doing the exam only 2 questions were ambiguous to me, and going out I remembered misclicking one answer, so I thought I was going to get 3 or 4 missed questions at most. But 92% means I missed like 6 questions I think, so there are 3 other questions I missed and I have absolutely no idea what they are since they all seem quite easy to me.

About the exam questions:
- one great thing about Enthuware is that some questions are really similar (but not identical) to the real exam's ones. Especially the bullshit onee like "describe the object philosophy", so it's good to be prepared about that
- they are easier than Enthuware's. If you scored high on Enthuware, you will pass the exam.

I had one ambiguous question in which I had to fill a constructor, and I had to chose between these two lines (not the real code so it's not cheating):

this.X = X:

super();
this.X = X;

These two pieces of code do the same damn thing, but I had only one option left to select one of them. I have no idea what the right option was. I chosed the former hoping that the question was also testing that I knew that super() was always added in the first line. I must have missed it 'cause "constructors" is on the objective list I missed.

In another ambiguous question I had something like this statement:
"All Runtime exceptions are recoverable."
This blanket statement seemed wrong to me, but all the others options seemed even more false so I selected it, knowing I was probably missing something. I got it wrong too on the objective missed.

I selected one answer wrong and I realized that later: I meant to click "1 object is garbage collected" and I clicked "2 objects are garbage collected", because I was thinking "2 objects are not garbage collected". Dumb mistake. Got it wrong in the objectives too.

I have another objectives missed, it's "using continue and break", so I must have made a dumb mistake about that at some point.

Voilà! Sorry for the length, looking back it seems like a wall of text with no real structure so I understand if it's not readable. Gonna bold the advices I feel are important.

Thanks Jeanne & Scott for the amazing guide. If you ever pass by Paris I'll buy you a beer.
Thanks Enthuware for the amazing & cheap mock exam software & question data bank. Same deal than above.
Thanks all the people posting in this forum. Come drink with me if you live in Paris!
Next objective is OCP! So see you soon (=

[Roel De Nijs]

Hi Aurelien,

Congratulations champion! Great achievement Now it's time to relax a bit and have a (well-deserved) (or 2 or 3). And if you want to spoil yourself have a Belgian beer, our beers are the best of the world

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Other ranchers will definitely benefit! Normally I would give one cow. But the experience you have posted is worth two cows! But although it's quite lengthy, this one is without any doubt the most comprehensive one

Don't forget to add your name to the OcajpWallOfFame!

Kind regards,
Roel

[Scott Selikoff]

Congrats Rels! Glad we could be of assistence! If I'm ever in Paris, I'll take that beer! If you liked our book so much, please consider writing a review on Amazon to help others searching for books.

Good luck on the OCP, it is noticeably more difficult, in part because the topics are very broad and there may only be 1-2 questions on a topic. I recommend reading our OCP book twice before taking the exam, especially the chapter on streams!

[Paul Anilprem]

Congratulations, Rels!
Glad to know that our s/w was helpful in your preparation.
Thanks for the review

[Aurelien Gamet]

Roel De Nijs wrote:Hi,

Congratulations champion! Great achievement Now it's time to relax a bit and have a (well-deserved) (or 2 or 3). And if you want to spoil yourself have a Belgian beer, our beers are the best of the world

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Other ranchers will definitely benefit! Normally I would give one cow. But the experience you have posted is worth two cows! But although it's quite lengthy, this one is without any doubt the most comprehensive one

Don't forget to add your name to the OcajpWallOfFame!

Kind regards,
Roel

Thanks belgium bro (= will do that.

Scott Selikoff wrote:Congrats Rels! Glad we could be of assistence! If I'm ever in Paris, I'll take that beer! If you liked our book so much, please consider writing a review on Amazon to help others searching for books.

Good luck on the OCP, it is noticeably more difficult, in part because the topics are very broad and there may only be 1-2 questions on a topic. I recommend reading our OCP book twice before taking the exam, especially the chapter on streams!

Sure I can do that. And yeah OCP seems way harder, I jsut started your and Jeanne's book and I got 30% at the assesment test p:

Paul Anilprem wrote:Congratulations, Rels!
Glad to know that our s/w was helpful in your preparation.
Thanks for the review

It was! Hopefully the OCP questions will be equally as insightful (=

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Congrats Aurelien! You correct that the OCP is way harder. And unsurprisingly, it also takes way more time to prepare for.

[med sah]

Congratulations champion! Great achievement !

i have a question ! is there some questions from the enthuware exam repeated in the certification exam ?

Tanks a lot x

[Joe San]

Congratulations!

[Roel De Nijs]

Hi med sah,

First of all, a warm welcome to CodeRanch!

med sah wrote:is there some questions from the enthuware exam repeated in the certification exam ?

Definitely not! That would be a violation of Oracle's Fraudulent Activity Policy. But sometimes other ranchers who passed the OCAJP exam mention that they did encounter several questions on the actual exam which were (very) similar with the Enthuware mock exam questions (like in this topic).

Hope it helps!
Kind regards,
Roel

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Roel De Nijs wrote: But sometimes other ranchers who passed the OCAJP exam mention that they did encounter several questions on the actual exam which were (very) similar with the Enthuware mock exam questions (like in this topic).

And with some topics, there are only so many ways you can ask a question on that point. So it is possible to have a very similar question by accident.

[Roel De Nijs]

Aurelien Gamet wrote:These two pieces of code do the same damn thing, but I had only one option left to select one of them. I have no idea what the right option was. I chosed the former hoping that the question was also testing that I knew that super() was always added in the first line. I must have missed it 'cause "constructors" is on the objective list I missed.

These two code snippets are (when inserted in an empty constructor) indeed fully equivalent of each other. So I would have selected both options and probably evaluated the other answers I already had selected again. If I encounter a mismatch between the number of correct answers and the number of answers I want to select, I always double-check (and even triple-check) the question, the code snippet and the different answer options. Because very often it's a mistake at my side (e.g. you have to select the answers which do not compile, a missing curly brace or semicolon, and so on). When I took the OCAJP7 certification exam, I had to select an answer option with a compiler error because all other options were definitely wrong. I reported this issue (with another minor one) to the Oracle Certification Program (OCP) Team using their Support Form and they provided feedback to me (which I also posted in that topic). So if you are really convinced the question listed the incorrect number of correct answers, you could contact the OCP team as well.

Aurelien Gamet wrote:In another ambiguous question I had something like this statement:
"All Runtime exceptions are recoverable."
This blanket statement seemed wrong to me, but all the others options seemed even more false so I selected it, knowing I was probably missing something. I got it wrong too on the objective missed.

Without any context it's almost impossible to tell if that answer would be correct or not. Normally you would think that a program can recover from a runtime exception. But there is one requirement: the program needs to have the appropriate exception handling. But if you for example forget to do a null check, you'll get a runtime exception and without appropriate exception handling the program will not be able to recover. Another possibility (depending on the question's context) might be that e.g. OutOfMemoryError is also considered as a runtime exception (i.e. an exception thrown at runtime) and your program will not be able to recover from this kind of exception (error).
If you encounter an ambiguous question on the exam, it's very likely to be a text only question. These questions are probably the hardest ones to interpret correctly, certainly for non-native English speakers.

Aurelien Gamet wrote:But 92% means I missed like 6 questions I think, so there are 3 other questions I missed and I have absolutely no idea what they are since they all seem quite easy to me.

That's very likely to happen! If you don't focus for 100% on every question, you might miss something important (e.g. a variable which is used out of scope) and you answer the question incorrectly. When I took [url=]the OCPJP6 certification exam[/url], I missed only one question and I immediately knew which one it was, because I had so much doubts about this question and spent maybe 5-10 minutes in total to answer it. But on the OCAJP7 certification exam I answered 3 questions incorrectly and I completely have no clue at all which ones.

Aurelien Gamet wrote:Thanks all the people posting in this forum. Come drink with me if you live in Paris!

I don't live in Paris, but I will be visiting Paris during the upcoming weekend

Kind regards,
Roel