Common mistakes on the OCA exam

Hi all,

Just wondering for some insight by those who know, but what are the more common areas that tend to trip people up in the OCA exam? I'm looking to sit the paper by the end of the year for work and want to make sure I'm getting the details nailed down.

Cheers,
S

On the exam you'll have to evaluate a lot of code snippets (and choose the correct output of these little programs). But almost each of these questions have "Runtime exception" and "Compilation fails", so you have to make sure you have perfect knowledge about:

the java syntax itself

variable scope

method overloading & overriding

This list is certainly not complete, but in my opinion these items will definitely increase your chances of passing the exam.

Stuie,

Its important to make yourself aware of the format of exam questions by answering a few sample exam questions. You can find link to some sample exam questions here.

Examine the exam objectives carefully and you should be able to find multiple areas that tend to trip people in this exam. For example, here's a (very) short list of the exam objectives with a relevant trip:

[3.3] Test equality between Strings and other objects using == and equals ()
a) == always compares object references. equals() can be overridden to compare object references or object state.

[7.5] Use super and this to access objects and constructors.
a) super and this are implicit object references made available to all java objects

Would love to see additions to this list!

With respect,
Mala

Interesting, will give the matter some more thorough reading then. Thanks for the replies so far everyone

S