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My turn - passed today!

 
Greenhorn
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Thanks to this forum and also the great K&B books I passed my OCPJP earlier today.

I spent two months revising casually (around 90 minutes every other evening) then booked the exam two weeks ago. Had to ramp up the study quite a lot and in the last week I was doing 2 - 2.5 hours each evening (which unfortunately coincided with some very busy periods at work, so it really zapped my brain)

I had set aside a lot of mock exams to run through before sitting the exam, but the looming date took away a lot of my options so I wasn't able to spend as much time sitting the mocks as I would have liked.

My learning approach
I started reading through the K&B book slowly, spending a lot of time on each chapter and taking the questions at the end of each. This was a bit discouraging actually, as I'd finish a chapter, take the questions with full enthusiasm, and then still see myself getting more questions wrong that I was happy with. This probably took a good 10 weeks or so.

Once I got to the end I accelerated the study by reading the material again from start to finish, moving over the concepts that I was sure I knew and spending more time on the trickier concepts, or memorisation of the bigger API's.

One week before the exam I moved onto some mocks. I don't recommend leaving it this late, but I had some time pressures as I am going on holiday soon and really wanted to gain certification before I left. Otherwise I'd have probably spent 3 weeks + doing mocks and continual revision.

Again, due to time constraints I didn't actually complete a full mock exam, so I would typically complete 20-40 questions (skipping drag and drop and other materials off scope) and then check my scores. I did around 30 questions from the MasterExam CD (K&B book) and scored around 65%. Did around 20 questions on ExamLab (~55%) and the night before the exam I did around 40 questions from the K&B OCP practice exam book, scoring in the high 60's.

Based on all that, I scored 88% in the exam. Obviously I don't know which ones I got wrong, but I didn't see a great deal of obvious obfuscation or sinister questions so yes, the real exam is a lot easier, and markedly so. In fact, after a week of answering tricky mock questions I was becoming very agitated about having to scour through every single line of code for tricky errors. I was very thankful that a large percentage of questions posed did not include the 'compilation fails' option, so once I saw a question without that answer it becomes easier and quicker to answer. There were still a few however, but just a few.

Thanks to the helpful community here, and good luck to anyone taking their exam in the coming months.
 
Sam Hazim
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Oh yes - forgot to mention - I mistakingly omitted any learning of Threads (as I thought they had been bumped off scope). I found out five days ago (that wasn't especially good news to me!). I'd have been a bit surprised when I saw my Thread questions today, but thankfully I got them all correct.

Don't make the same foolish mistake I almost did!
 
Sam Hazim
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Can anyone tell me what literature I should expect to receive from Oracle, and how long it should take (I'm in the UK)?
 
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You'll get your certificate in 4 to 6 weeks. It also contains two other documents (might have changed since I cleared) which contains some info about the certificate and how you can download the SCJP logo...
 
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