Hi everyone. I am having a huge problem of time management while preparing for the ocp (1z0-809) exam.
I am an Engineering student and I have very less time to study for the exams. I passes the oca (1z0-808) exam on Feb,2018 with 88% marks. After that I started preparing for the OCP exams.
I am writing a big post because I want to explain what I studied till now so that I get better advice.
I have studied for about 4 months.
Topics in OCP seemed to be much more tougher than OCA and it took a lot of time since I knew nothing about most of the topics. I used the same preparation strategy as I did for the OCA exam...
I used the OCP book by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Slikoff
OCP Book
I also used the OCP chapter wise Practice tests books from the same author.
OCP Practice Tests
I studied each chapter from the text book then I solved the end chapter questions (about 20 to 25 questions)
After that I solved the questions corresponding to that chapter from the Practice tests book ( about 40 to 50 questions)
This is the marks I got in the chapter wise practice tests ( 40 to 50 questions) :
Java Class Design - 78%
Advanced Java Class Design - 80%
Generics and Collections - 77.5%
Lambda Build-in Functional interfaces - 65%
Java Streams API - 60%
Exceptions and Assertions - 60%
Use Java SE 8 Date/Time API - 77.5%
Java I/O Fundamentals - 62.5%
Java File I/O (NIO.2) - 62.5%
Java Concurrency - 60%
Building Database Applications using
JDBC - 77.5%
Localization - 75%
I got the above marks after studying each chapter first time and since the number of questions where 40 to 50 I thought the percentage I got was not so bad.
Then after solving all questions I made a notes copy where I wrote all the mistakes , important points , concepts that I understood by running small codes and searching on the java forums .
Then I concluded the chapter and went with the next chapter. By using this strategy and I completed 10 chapters and I now have 2 big notes copy.
After that I realized that since I was going chapter wise, while I was studying the last chapters I forgot things I studied about the first chapters so I spend the last 15 days revising all the chapters NOT from text book but from the notes copy I prepared.
After this I felt confident enough to go to the Enthuware exams ...
Yesterday I took the foundation
test ( 40 questions ) in enthuware passed with 80% ( 32 correct out of 40 ). I read my mistakes and today I tried the first enthuware exam ....
I FAILED with 59% and took 35 mins longer than the time allotted... I only finished 66 questions in 150mins
After all the preparation I took this completely destroyed my confidence. I was thinking about appearing for the exam by the mid of next month but now I am not sure.
I also used enthuware for preparing for the exam in OCA and never got bellow 70% and had an average of 79% in the enthuware exams.
I feel that Oracle should change the time allotted for the OCP exam. OCA had 70 questions with 150 min time but I managed to complete the real exam with 3 mins left. OCP has 85 questions ! with 150 min time this is scary ...
I assume the OCP questions are much harder than OCA and require more time thinking than OCA topics then why so less time ?
Even some of the well known authors felt the same :
CodeRanch
I feel enthuware exams some times over stresses on topics like inner classes by making things too much complicated which takes a lot of time to read and think about the questions apart from that I found some questions that where not familiar to me
like a lot of questions where they used
Thread class and Runnable interface but wile studying from the text I found most of the time they used Executor Service and their methods and only mentioned the Thread class briefly.
Now before going to the next enthuware exams please help me out what should I do to manage time and get better marks as it seems impossible to me . I am completely lost and this forum is my only hope.