Fellow Ranchers,
It's official. As on Nov. 19, 2000 around 12:30 PST I am no longer a
SCJP Aspirant. I am now a SCJP!!! With a score of 74%
I marked like 22 questions on my first pass.
First off let me thank everyone for all of their feedback on the exam. It scaried to the point that I studied like a madman during the final 3 days before the
test. I got to the point where I had memorized every constructor for IO, AWT and UTIL in Khalid's book. In fact I memorized all of the method listed and hierarcy chart listing in Khalid's book.
I also wrote these huge programs which included every possible combination of IO(Streams/Reader&Writer + encoding), AWT Layout,Collection and component combination. The
Java compiler actually helped me learn all the constructors.
Let me tell all of you none of the mocks do the exam justice. The whole Exhibit button thing kind of threw me off at first. You have to look at the code then look at the answers. Even with the "Title" button it's hards to see everything.
Here's my score breakdown:
Declarations/Access control - 75% 5
Flow Control/Exception - 85% 5
Garbage Collection - 0% 1 // Which surprized me.
Lang Fundamentals - 77% 3-4
Operators and Assignments - 57% 2-3
Overloading/Overriding - 85% 6-7 //Got a lot of these
Threads - 42% 4 // All in a rows
java.awt - 100% 4 //I studied these hard
java.lang - 100% 3 //Look at Sun's tutorial
java.util - 57% 4 //Thought I did better
java.io - 100% 4-5 // I studied these hard
Let me just say that Marcus Green's tutorial by objective helped me identify my areas of weakness a great deal. His mocks are good but not really a true representation of the actual exam.
I studied Khalid's book for about 2 months. Took every mock exam I could find(Khalid's is actually harder than the exam).
Here's a few tips:
1.) Don't waste
alot of time on a single question.
Mark and go back if necessary.
2.) Elminate the answers which are obiviously wrong ASAP.
Then focus on what's left.
3.) Watch out for the "Exhibit" button
(It really threw me when I first saw it.)
4.) Make sure you check the sample questions from Sun's
site I got a question (pertaining to "is a") which was
almost the exact opposite of the "has a" question on
their site.
5.) Look out for answers which are more correct
(i.e. A) Compiler error
B) Compiler error caused by line 6)
I have so much feedback. If anyone has any specific questions I will be more than happy to try to answer them. Thank you all for all your help.
Regards,
Travis M. Gibson
Sun Certified Java 2 Programmer