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Passed SCJP: 86% ..and comments

 
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Hey all,

I'd like to thank Kathy and Bert for the excellent book. I printed out all the bullet points at the end of each chapter and stuck them together. It was a great resource to go through before hitting mock exams.

Also big thanks to Dan Chisholm (who isn't a relative BTW ). At first your December exams really frustrated me, but I saw the immense value in them and stuck to it. Your July set of exams seemed easier (my imagination?) and I went through the first 13 before the real test. There WERE a few very similar questions on my exam that were in your mocks. I was scoring between 65-80% on your mocks (higher near the end).

Also thanks to Marcus Green for the mocks that turned out to be about the same difficulty of the exam. I scored mid 80s on those.

For those interested, I scored 844 on the mock exam included with the K&B book and finished about 43 mins early. I did NOT go back to check questions on that exam. The question pool is not large so save the "full" mock until just before the real exam.

On the real exam I finished 33 mins early; time which I used to re-evaluated (mostly marked) questions. Obviously it didn't help much

I know the questions are pooled but it seemed moderately time-consuming up-front (did 33 questions in 60 mins), and then it eased off. Like the K&B book pointed out, there were quite a few thread questions... know your threads!

If I were to study all over again, I'd definitely buy K&B's book and also Dan's printed exam book (which I didn't do because it doesn't seem to be on Amazon.ca, only Amazon.com).

Only advice: make sure you do a few mocks the way you would do the real exam: and then do it the same way in the exam! I tried K&B's technique a few times and it didn't work for me for some reason -- although I definitely see merit in it (ie: cherry pick, go back, answer and mark, go back, evaluate). Instead I felt more comfortable going sequentially, and practiced that way. Even though I did the first 33 questions in 60 minutes I didn't panic, and just stuck to the game plan... finishing about 30 mins early!
 
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To Robert Chisholm
 
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Congratulations Robert!

Thank you for using my exams!

I'm surprised to see that my book is not yet available on Amazon.ca although it is available on Amazon.com. Unfortunately, the only way to find my book on Amazon.com is by searching on the title or the ISBN. A search on my name won't find it.

What is the advantage in using Amazon.ca rather than Amazon.com? Does Amazon.com ship books to Canada?

My book is printed and distributed by a company named booksurgepublishing.com. They print single copies of my book in response to each customer order. If a customer orders my book from Amazon, then Amazon forwards the order to booksurgepublishing and booksurgepublishing sends the order to the printing facility located nearest the customer. Booksurgepublishing claims to work with printing facilities located around the world, so the book probably won't have to travel very far regardless of the location of the customer.

I should also mention that there is an error on the Amazon.com web page that contains the search results for my book title. The error is the statement claiming that my book is out of print. Of course, that is not true. Instead, the truth is that my book is not printed until the customer orders a copy. Instead of saying that the book is out of print it would be more correct to say "We'll print it when you order it."

Once again, Congratulations Robert!
 
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