Shane Jensen wrote:What are, in your opinion, the hardest topics covered on the OCAJP 8 eam?
If you don't have a good and solid understanding of every exam topic/objective, each exam topic/objective on the OCAJP certification exam will be hard. If you know how to write Java applications, you might still fail the OCAJP certification exam because it really requires an in-depth knowledge of the exam topics/objectives.
Probably the biggest challenge will be that an exam question is very likely to test you about several different exam topics. So you might think it's a question about exception handling but in fact it's about access modifiers. So if you don't know e.g. the rules for overloading/overriding, you might fail (because many questions might have overloaded and/or overridden methods while other concepts/topics are tested in these questions).
And there are a few other things responsible for making the OCAJP certification exam challenging and hard:
the time limitthe nervesthe assessment of code snippets using nothing but pen and paper (= main reason why you should not use an IDE during your preparation)