Whew... after a very very tiring day.
I am glad that I passed the OCAJP7 exam, and kudos to this very active
java community
for sharing their wonderful experiences, tips and resources.
Here's a recap of my certification preparation:
I've started my study more than two months ago, I think last week of february 2014. I did a thorough research on the web and found this great java forum where I discovered many helpful resources.
from that, I chose:
* OCA Java SE 7 Programmer I Certification Guide: Prepare for the 1ZO-803 exam by Mala Gupta
* SCJP6 by K&B
Mock Exams:
* Enthuware OCAJP7 Practice Tests
* Whizlabs OCAJP7 Practice Tests
I read mala's book cover to cover, and after reviewing it I took the mock
test scoring 80%. Then, from time to time I read the
thread posts here at java ranch and also posted a number of questions here.
I tried enthuware's mock exams but after answering a few questions, then I said to myself this is enough. It's quite harder than the mock test in mala's book. So I began to try to review SCJP6 by K&B and carefully
read chapters 1-6,10. After that I reread again mala's book together with some coding practice to familiarize myself on what might that code snippet result/what might happen if I do that...
After coding and reading and analyzing stuffs, I retried enthuware's mock exam and passed all of it. I think I scored higher here because my mind was still fresh from reviewing and it's of high quality.
Even though I've done the mock exams from enthuware I was still not satisfied, I want to make sure that I am 100% ready so I decided to try whizlabs based on some users feedback here.
What I could say is that enthuware is of high quality compared to whizlabs and should be priced higher than it but you can get that for only 10$. That's good for those preparing for the exam. Whizlabs is
good, but not good enough. They haven't been proofread carefully because I noticed mistakes on grammar, spelling, some case letters of code snippets (like upper case Public), etc. Enthuware has the hardest mock exams while whizlabs is a bit easier. I took my whizlab's last day test yesterday scoring 86%. And to my suprise, I got almost the same score with my real exam scoring 85%. Though, I was disappointed I missed my objective to score at least 90 or more.
Now, the wrong things I that happened before and during the exam day:
* I booked my exam just after 3 business days left. I wasn't sure if I will go to the testing center yesterday because I haven't received any confirmation email. Just a last minute look at my email before I went to sleep that I discovered my confirmation email. So I crammed and prepared the things I need for the exam.
* I wasn't able to sleep early.
* During registration at PearsonVue website, this was very unfortunate for me because I encountered an error that not only affected me but also some of the test takers. So I needed to contact each of pearsonvue support for almost an hour because not all numbers seem to work from oracle's phone. This was really exhausting, and I really thought I wouldn't be able to take the exam.
* It's already lunch time and I'm just at the beginning of the exam. Haven't taken my lunch before exam.
I'm not blaiming any of these factors for my score, but I hope that others won't get this bad experience.
Whew, this was really a tiring day for me...
Still, at least I reached my goal.
I'm satisfied now.
Hopefully, OCPJP7 will be my next target. Thank you!
4
