Three years ago I've passed OCAJP 7 (1Z0-803) with 95% (
story). At the time I was still in university and the certification helped me in getting my first job.
Of course, I had a dream of passing stage two (1Z0-804). Unfortunately I got caught up in graduating from the university, starting my career and stuff. Long story short, I've never found time to do that. Moreover, the task seemed insurmountable to me since since the amount of needed knowledge material is considerably higher for OCP. This year I thought that OCP might be a nice goal to complete till the end of 2016. A couple of months ago I've moved to a different country and started brushing up my skills for a new job. A large amount of preparation was done with K&B 6 for SCJP. That's when I thought of giving a try to OCP. I passed through K&B 7 including basic chapters and giving attention to the new ones. I decided to try one Enthuware test. If the score was to be bad, I'd drop this endeavour till some time later. Otherwise, I'd try and make a crazy sprint for a couple of weeks to pass the exam (unfortunately, currently I'm not in the position to spend months on preparation).
To my surprise, the first score was 80% and I decided to get the ball rolling. Overall results were 80-86-83-86-89-80-74-85-NA (didn't have time to take the last one). That is an average of 83%. The drop in the last results is due to incredibly pressing learning schedule and my physical limitations. Whereas with OCAJP I took 3 days on average to go through one mock test, this time it was strictly one day for each test, no exceptions. During my last tests I started to feel a great deal of fatigue and decided it was time to stop with whatever I've got.
Simply put, I'd be more than satisfied with a result of more than 80%. This week I've got 86% with approx. 40 minutes of time left. That is more than enough taking into account my learning schedule, time pressure and stress.
1. The exam did not surprise me and contents were pretty much expected.
2. I've encountered a couple of questions on regex replacing capabilities. I explicitly remember K&B 7 saying that those will not be tested so I didn't even spend my time learning the method signatures.
3. Learn constructor parameters for I/O classes. E.g., which Reader can be constructed with File and which with String. That was my struggle sometimes.
I think I'll be aiming at 1Z0-810 now but that will be after I get initial things done in my next job.
Good luck to everyone! You're more capable than you might think.