Passed SCWCD with 86% - my experience

Hi all,

Happy to say that I passed the SCWCD with 86% yesterday. Not a great score in absolute terms, but much higher than I was anticipating. I had my SCWCD voucher expiring during 1st week of May 2011 and was forced to prepare and take the exam within the last one month

, since I couldn't let the voucher expire!!!

As far as my preparation goes, I used the K & B java servlets and jsp book and would have read it a couple of times. I was very comfortable with the Servlet sections, but not so much with some of the JSP sections (and that is what brought my score down). Also I had taken the enthuware exams and scored on an average around 70% in it (Note: I took the enthuware exams in a casual manner - finished each exam in around 60 minutes or so). The K & B book mock exams were really difficult (due to choose all correct answers) and I scored only around 50% - so don't be disappointed by that if you take that exam. Unfortunately there were several mistakes in the K&B mock exam (in terms of correct answers) and I didn't have the patience to refer to the errata for everything. But enthuware brought my confidence level up, though I don't think I made the best use of it.

One thing to note (as someone already pointed out) is that the questions in the real exam was much more descriptive i.e. each question came with kind of a story/situation about something and then followed by a question. So you definitely need to have good reading comprehension to tackle them. Otherwise you might be wasting too much of time reading through a question again and again and fall into the time pressure trap.

One tip I would like to share (as you might already know) is the power of elimination - helped me to answer many questions correctly. It is a big winner in multiple choice questions. Some of the answer choices have silly/obvious mistakes that you could eliminate them. The rest of the choices are easy to eliminate once you read through them carefully. So use the elimination strategy. Of course that doesn't mean you could pass the exam (or get high scores) without knowing the fundamentals.

I was surprised to see many questions (many more than I had expected) about Design patterns. That was another area that brought my score down. Lot of questions about <jsp:useBean...> combined with <jsp:setProperty...> etc. May be 4 drag and drop questions. Be thorough with the EL implicit parameters. Many questions based on that. Also questions from Simple tag library and the Classic tag library (should know the return values etc.). Other mix of questions as expected.

Will add if I could think of anything else.

Good luck to all the aspirants for a successful SCWCD or whatever they are aiming for.

Last but not the least, a big thanks to the javaranch forum members for always being there to help. This is a priceless support.

Cogratulations

Congratulations!!!

congrats

Congarts!

Awesome... Congrats.

Congrats larry,

Cna you tell me how you started your prep with the jsp part, as i am very uncomfortable with that section.....

Hi jishnu,

I used two main sources.

1) Slides from the coreservlets.com website - here and here. I stumbled upon these while searching on the internet. I found these very succint, useful and easy for review with good examples and it is free too!
2) Of course I also used the Head first Servlets and JSP book - which is fun to read and learn.

HTH,
Good luck

Thanks Larry!!!..wheres the party???

Congratulations !

Can you tell me how much time it took to prepare for the exam ?

Congrats!

Hi Rahul,

I took one month with ah hour of study during weekdays and few hours during weekends + Lots of coding using the tomcat I had installed on my computer. It was nothing like the intense preparation for SCJP, but much lighter. I felt SCWCD was much easier than the SCJP. At least the questions are less complicated.

HTH.