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The beta exam

 
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Still wondering why no one has come forward with their stories about the exam.

I took it today, went through the 180 questions in about 4.5 hours. I think I skipped (guessed) two or three very long/complex ones. To me, the time was sufficient; as for endurance, I started to feel tired on the fourth hour. The questions were on all the objectives listed and for all possible levels, including quite a number of easy ones.

As for the �beta� aspect of the exam, I cannot affirm it without the questions before my eyes, but I feel that I found quite a few inaccuracies in the questions, notably in entity class annotations, rules like: the �many� side is the owner, the �mappedBy� element is on the other side, the foreign key is in the owner table etc. It would be interesting to compare these impressions.
 
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Hi Edvin,

That's a great input. How much you scored and what is the pass percentage?

Regards..Lawrence J
 
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Hi Edvins,

GREAT...You are the very 1st person on javaranch to take the Exam.
Please provide full details of Exam.Reading Specs w'd be enough ?

What's your score and how did you prepared ?

Regards
Shaival
 
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Originally posted by Edvins Reisons:
Still wondering why no one has come forward with their stories about the exam.

I took it today, went through the 180 questions in about 4.5 hours. I think I skipped (guessed) two or three very long/complex ones. To me, the time was sufficient; as for endurance, I started to feel tired on the fourth hour. The questions were on all the objectives listed and for all possible levels, including quite a number of easy ones.

As for the �beta� aspect of the exam, I cannot affirm it without the questions before my eyes, but I feel that I found quite a few inaccuracies in the questions, notably in entity class annotations, rules like: the �many� side is the owner, the �mappedBy� element is on the other side, the foreign key is in the owner table etc. It would be interesting to compare these impressions.




Nice to hear that.
So what suggestions would you give to endure.

What were the notes/books did you refer and was it sufficient to answer the questions(except for those 3 ones).

There was mention of tutorial and survey.Was the time alloted for them part of the exam time (5.5 hours)?

Were you able to review all the questions?

How much do you think you may get (score)?

Any suggestions for the beta takers.
 
Edvins Reisons
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Hi all,

I did expect my score then and there; no, it will come in a few months, with, or without, the certificate.

The timing is 15� for the survey and then 5 hours for the exam (180 questions), which means that one has to answer the questions fast and watch the clock.

The principal sources that I used to prepare for the exam were the Java 5 EE tutorial, �Mastering EJB 3.0� and the sections of the EJB 3 specs that correspond to the exam objectives (this is where Mikalai Zaikin guide can help a lot). On the whole, I believe that the specs contain what is needed for the exam, and a lot more; if, unlike me, you can read and understand them easily, you may succeed with the specs alone.

Best wishes
 
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hii.
yes, exam cannot contain what is not in the specs
apart from that can you please email me taneja.amit@gmail.com
some types of questions that come in exams please ??

i mean are questions similar kind that come in scbcd1.3

like the objectives of transaction, exception and security are same ..
so can we refer the questions banks and mock exam for scbcd 1.3 for some similar objectives and upgrade with updation ?
in short ..are the question are similar kind that come in scbcd 1.3 ?

and are the questions are directly focus on the objectives the sun give here
http://www.sun.com/training/certification/java/beta_objectives_scbcd.html

kindly give your feed back and email me regarding the questions and give hints .. it will be great help in my preparation
 
Rajan Murugan
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Thank you Edvins.
[ December 16, 2006: Message edited by: Rajan Murugan ]
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by amit taneja:


like the objectives of transaction, exception and security are same ..
so can we refer the questions banks and mock exam for scbcd 1.3 for some similar objectives and upgrade with updation ?
in short ..are the question are similar kind that come in scbcd 1.3 ?




In my preparation, for better or worse, I deliberately avoided anything 1.3 - related, because I find it difficult to keep the two versions and their differences in mind all the time. And yes, you can expect more than a few questions with responses to select from the old and the new bean behavior.
 
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Edvins,


Still wondering why no one has come forward with their stories about the exam.


I guess this is because most of the people decided to take the exam at "the last minute", and thus, there are only a few posts about it. By approaching the maturity, more and more posts will come.



As for the �beta� aspect of the exam, I cannot affirm it without the questions before my eyes, but I feel that I found quite a few inaccuracies in the questions, notably in entity class annotations, rules like: the �many� side is the owner, the �mappedBy� element is on the other side, the foreign key is in the owner table etc. It would be interesting to compare these impressions.



For this aspect, did you provide your "comments" in the comment box? That's the point why Sun offer Free beta exams, because our comments are valuable.

We take part in the exam, help fixing problems, and the important thing, get certified for free!

Nick
[ December 16, 2006: Message edited by: Nicholas Cheung ]
 
Nicholas Cheung
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yes, exam cannot contain what is not in the specs
apart from that can you please email me taneja.amit@gmail.com
some types of questions that come in exams please ??



I hope you are not asking for what questions are actually appeared in the exam, but just wanna know the level of difficulty and the exam topics.

Please notice that before you take the exam, you have accepted and agreed the terms and conditions from Sun that you will NOT disclose the content of the exam in order to maintain the integrity and values for the exams.

Nick
 
amit taneja
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to Edvins Reisons
" And yes, you can expect more than a few questions with responses to select from the old and the new bean behavior."

I didn't get what you mean by this.. i just aks that are the questions are similar kind of format, type of question, as in scbcd 1.3


to NICk,
i am not saying to disclouse, the exact question asked in the exam, i know the terms of sun and infact of Javaranch, thats why i said, only to tell the kind and type of questions and the difficulty level ?
as prepration book for all certificates also have exercise to prepare the kind of question that appear in actual exam and not that they copy paste the exact question, which don't break any law,


so Edvins Reisons , can you please tell us, are all question are v.much focus to the detail objective (the link i post above) so that we can prepair according to the objectvies specifically as we have less time,
and kindly tell and give eg. the kind of eg.

CAN WE DO EXERSISE TO SOME OLD QUESTION, OF SCBCD 1.3, WHICH SHARE SIMILAR OBJECTIVES, OBVIOUSLY WE WILL DO ACCORDING TO EJB 3.0 (KEEPING IN MIND)


REGARDS
Amit
 
Edvins Reisons
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It feels so good to know that somebody values our comments
However, with average 1'40" per question and no reference text available,
it is difficult to meet this sort of expectations. I marked a few questions that appeared suspicious, I put a half comment/half question here, and I can send comments to the exam creators if there is an address available.
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by amit taneja:
CAN WE DO EXERSISE TO SOME OLD QUESTION, OF SCBCD 1.3, WHICH SHARE SIMILAR OBJECTIVES, OBVIOUSLY WE WILL DO ACCORDING TO EJB 3.0 (KEEPING IN MIND)



My view during preparation was, and still is, that this approach was not going to help me. In fact, be warned, the exam questions contain answer choices that were correct according to the 1.3, but are wrong now.
 
Rajan Murugan
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Originally posted by Edvins Reisons:



And yes, you can expect more than a few questions with responses to select from the old and the new bean behavior.



Does that mean you may get questions that expect you to know both versions?
 
Nicholas Cheung
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Edvins,

However, with average 1'40" per question and no reference text available, it is difficult to meet this sort of expectations. I marked a few questions that appeared suspicious, I put a half comment/half question here, and I can send comments to the exam creators if there is an address available.



That's why Evelyn gives us 5 hours and 15 mins.

You may send Bert and Kathy the comments, as I believe that they would be the exam creators.

Nick
 
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Does that mean you may get questions that expect you to know both versions?



I guess what Edvins means is that, some codes that given to you in the answer, is TOTALLY correct/runable in EJB 2.x, however, it won't be compiled/not work under EJB 3.0.

Thus, those answers are here to trick us.

Nick
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by Rajan Murugan:


Does that mean you may get questions that expect you to know both versions?



In my opinion, it is sufficient to know the new version, and it may help to not be distracted by knowledge of the old one
 
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Hi Edvins,

can you please comment following

- web services and their part of the exam (is is sufficient to know stuff from Oreilly EJB or Mastering EJB (since the ejb spec only refers to web services specs)),

- were deployment desciptor questions difficult for you (and how deep your knowledge on dd is?)

Thanks,

Milan
 
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Hello Edvin,

Do you have Mastering EJB 3.0 pdf version, can you please send that file to this id ssss63@yahoo.co.in if you have that.

Cheers
 
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Frederik,

a quick Google search will point you to the download of "Mastering EJB". It's a massive PDF file - nobody is going to send that by email.
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by Milan Maric:

- web services and their part of the exam (is is sufficient to know stuff from Oreilly EJB or Mastering EJB (since the ejb spec only refers to web services specs)),

- were deployment desciptor questions difficult for you (and how deep your knowledge on dd is?)



Milan,

I think that the exam contents corresponded quite closely to the objectives. So, for web services which are mentioned only once in the objectives, the questions were few and rather simple, while the deployment descriptors appeared often, as they do in the exam objectives, and some of the questions could get quite complex. As for my knowledge, I'll see it when the score comes
 
amit taneja
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Edvins Reisons
kindly reply in details and you have still not given answer to my questions ..
kindly re read all what i wrote in my very previous post

Best Regards
Amit
 
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Hi Edvins,
Could you tell me, incase of entity, should we read xml deployment descriptor along with annotations?
I feel really exausted by xml deployment syntax.

Thanks in advance.
-Tridib
 
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Dear Friends

I have appeared for the SCBCD Beta exam on 15th Dec

Initially there were few survey questions (around 11)

Exam related :

There are 180 questions.

Please concentrate on

Persistence, Entity Beans, Query Language,Transactions (50% of Questions)
Session bean (15%)
Message driven Bean (15%)
Security (6%)
Others(14%)

Please have good understanding on basic concepts. Concentrate more on Entity Beans/Peristance, Query Language and Transactions

We need to have lot of Patience to sit for long time for answering 180 Questions.

Thanks to SUN for giving me this opportunity to write beta and

Thanks to java ranch to providing me platform to share the experience

Wish you all the Best
 
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After giving the exam did you got the score and if not what would be the expected time duration after which we will get the score for scbcd beta exam.
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by Shawn Michaels:
After giving the exam did you got the score and if not what would be the expected time duration after which we will get the score for scbcd beta exam.



The score is going to arrive about February - March 07, with the certificate
 
Edvins Reisons
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Dear Ranchers,

thanks for your support and interest, and my apologies for not having answered some very detailed questions.

This site has plenty of other interesting topics to discuss, like
pizza preferences , which means that I am going to appear here less often.

Best of luck to everybody taking the exam!


Cheers!
 
Edvins Reisons
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Originally posted by Tridib Samanta:

Could you tell me, incase of entity, should we read xml deployment descriptor along with annotations?
I feel really exausted by xml deployment syntax.



Looks like the DDs are NOT in the exam objectives as far as entities are concerned. There are objectives (and consequently, questions) on mapping and packaging, though.
[ December 18, 2006: Message edited by: Edvins Reisons ]
 
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