Hi Guys,
I am little bit late to post my result. I cleared SCWCD on last Thursday. It was a wonderful experience. I was preparing to take the exam at the middle of the May. But suddenly there was travel requirement from my company. So I register to take the exam next day. At night I rapidly went through the HFSJ and my notes and took the exam next day.
Here is how I prepared for the exam:
After taking Sun�s free beta exam for SCBCD 5.0. I decided to take SCWCD. I am working in web technology for last 2 years. But I never had a chance to work with all the web components like filter, SimpleTag, EL etc. So, I started reading the Forum for SCWCD in JavaRanch, the best site for java certification. The valuable post by different test takers gave me the idea how should I prepared.
1.I set a time line of 3 months.
2.I bought Head First Servlet and JSP. Started to read it thoroughly. My target was to finish it within one month. I marked the new concepts while reading.
3.I tried to answer the question in JavaRanch. But it seems that either the questions are out of my knowledge or I am not confident about the answer. Then, I started to read each chapter from HFSJ and searched all the topics in JavaRanch related to the chapter. Start reading/answering the question. That built my perfection on the topic.
4.After finishing the book I started to answer questions in Java Ranch independent of the topic. Whenever I had doubt, I consulted specs.
5.At the same time I started to take all the mock exams available in the website. But most of them contain question from previous version. After every mock exam, I read the topic in which I did mistake making sure I can answer all type of question from that particular area. Here are links:
http://www.j2eecertificate.com/scwcd/control/examcenter http://www.jiris.com/ http://javaranch.com www.jdiscuss.com You will get links to other mock exams from the above sites.
6.The evening before the exam I took final mock exam of HFSJ. I scored 79%. I was thinking that this time the HFSJ Mock score + 20% rule is not going to be true for me because that will be a huge score.
7.On the exam day, I didn�t too much. I took the bathe and went to take the exam. Most of the question was straightforward. But I didn�t know the answers of few questions. I applied the rule of elimination. That helped a lot.
8.I completed the exam in 1:10 hr. Rest of the time I made a revision of all the questions. Finished the exam.
This was a great feeling preparing for the exam. I will first like to thank Java Ranch and it�s members. I get the spirit to get certified from this forum. I like to thank especially to Satou kurinosuke, Peabody, Ulf Dittmer, Sergio Tridente, Anupama Ponnapalli , Mallika shah, Sri Kan and many more whose name I can�t remember at this moment but helped me getting this big score.
Thanks to Peabody for his great, concise design pattern notes. But, I missed the beer
. The design pattern questions were straightforward compare to mock exams.
I like to thank HFSJ team for their great book. But there are few errors in the book which seems to be dangerous for newbie. So always keep the errata with you whenever reading the book.
I like to have a Head First book for Web Service certification. My final suggestion will be, practice the mock exams well and make sure you understand the concept behind the question which you answered wrong.
Wish you all the best!
[ April 24, 2007: Message edited by: Tridib Samanta ]
. Is it what happens in Beta exams?
