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Is SCJP test adapive?

 
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I have been reading lot of posts in the "results" forum. Many ppl say that the actual tests are simpler than mocks, some say they are tougher. Especially this is true for the topics such as threads; where some say that questions are mostly basic, while others say that they are tricky and extensive. Most of the well known mocks are public and have fixed level of difficulty, moreover they have same questions over the period of time.
This makes me wonder whether the actual test is adaptive; and advanced enough to generate random questions based on your previous answers OR is it just plain luck and/or perspective of an individual?
I would be grateful if ppl who have taken the actual test and those who have been associted with it could provide some insight.
TIA,
- Manish
 
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NO it is not. i was aslo confused abut this.but when marcus said NO then i was convinced.
 
mister krabs
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It is not adaptive. 59 questions randomly selected from the database based on several categories. That way you can't get 59 thread questions.
 
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Supposedly the possibility of making the test adaptive has been raised at Sun, but I don't think they have decided to do it.
Creating a fair adaptive test requires gathering LOTS of beta test results in order to rank the questions by difficulty within each topic.
We (Lanwrights) made some adaptive tests to emulate the Microsoft tests which are adaptive. It takes a big pool of questions that have been ranked.
Bill
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Manish Hatwalne
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Originally posted by Thomas Paul:
It is not adaptive. 59 questions randomly selected from the database based on several categories. That way you can't get 59 thread questions.


Thank God!
59 thread questions will make a rope that could tie anyone down.
Hmmm, I guess it's plain luck if you get tough ones in this. That's life.
- Manish
 
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It's not adaptive and it is only difficult in the sense that you have to know the subject well. Part of the trick is to ensure you spend your time well by getting a good understanding of the things that can come up, and don't worry too much about the rest of the stuff you can learn over the rest of your Java career.
Thus for example, although it requires a good knowledge of some aspects of Threading, areas of Threading are not tested at all (ie you can be ignorant of ThreadGroup). But if you don't know the signature of the the run method and the requirements for the use of wait/notify you might be tripped up.

Marcus

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