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My exam experience

 
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Just returned from a testing centre.
First, as was stated before, beta is 240 mins, not 255 mins as they told us upon registering.
I scheduled exam on 12:00 GMT, and I didn't have any problems with drag'n'drop questions (were they fixed?).
There are NO 'type-it-in' questions. Although there are _many_ DnD questions now (I really enjoyed them). The only part that irritated me was the slot threshold - you had to position an item almost precisely in the slot. The other one can be the need to redo the DnD if you finish it, exit, and then want to change smth, but that wasn't a problem for me - all of DnDs were quite straightforward.
There were one or two real brain-teasers on EJB-QL topic. As Dragan said, you could put it in IQ test easily. Things are not always what they seem at first.
I definitely say that you _must_ have O'Reilly's EJB 3rd edition for it has the best explanation of CMR I've ever seen. Roman's book can't compare in this respect (but can in others).
You really must know the DD. Even if they say you need only general knowledge, there were questions where you had to read CMR section in DD and name the relationship. The same applies to security stuff.
Experience in CMR relations programming is tested quite intensely. Again, I recommend O'Reilly's book above all for this.
As you already know, deep understanding of EJB roles is essential.
The next important topic is beans' lifecycles - you should have a clear picture of it in your mind for every bean. Many DnD questions rely on this knowledge.
A huge portion of exam was testing your knowledge of transactions. But if you understand those 6 attributes and all possible combinations and behaviours those will be the easiest questions.
An important part of exam tests your knowledge of transactional/non-transactional methods. Remember, there are significant differences between SFSB and SLSB. One of the questions even offered you to fill in the table with the methods and allowed activities (this one is available in EJB spec).
Testing of MDB was quite generic.
There was a new kind of questions where you had a section of code and had to put in the required statements (DnD).
Somewhere after question 150 there were miscellaneous small topics, unlike before where you had like 20-30 questions on the subject.
Sometimes there were questions which couldn't be answered if you never have had experince in coding EJBs. The spec just covers it in multiple places scattered throughout the document, and it could be hard to find a concise answer from it.
In general, this was one of the best exams I took, and Sun did a good job in bringing some new stuff into the process.
Had a pint of Guinness. Life feels good
[ June 06, 2003: Message edited by: Andrew Perepelytsya ]
 
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Thanks Andrew for your informative post.
 
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The drag and drop issues were faced by guys whose exams were downloaded from Australia.

I was not able to use my mouse which stopped working. I had to use keyboard shortcut . Some of the button did not have key board short cuts.. I was not able to continue from there.
Andrew, Whats the score that you are expecting?
 
Andrew Perepelytsya
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I'm sorry you had those problems, really frustrating.
As for the score, I cannot say the score before beta is over, but I can say I stopped to sit and think only for 5-6 questions. Others were straightliners and I actually spent more time thinking over the comments (typing is not a problem for me).
I'm pretty sure I passed. But no time to celebrate. Have to move on. Am I becoming a cert addict?
 
Pradeep bhatt
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Thanks for your concern, Andrew!
I AM sure you will be very close to 100%
 
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Andrew,
Congrats in taking the exam. I'm glad it went well for you.
I put an Urgent call to Prometric in regards to the DnD problems. This is not a worldwide problem, only in certain testing sites, they are working on resolving this issue right away. I want to apologize to all beta testers for this inconvenience.
Thanks.
Evelyn
 
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Andrew, thank u for sharing all the important details.
Regards, Sudd
 
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Originally posted by Evelyn Cartagena:
Andrew,
Congrats in taking the exam. I'm glad it went well for you.
I put an Urgent call to Prometric in regards to the DnD problems. This is not a worldwide problem, only in certain testing sites, they are working on resolving this issue right away. I want to apologize to all beta testers for this inconvenience.
Thanks.
Evelyn


I encountered the same problem. After three reboots of the system and encountering the problem again each time, I pretty much gave up on the DnD questions that I'd not answered. This really needs to be fixed, imho, before the test goes gold. (And I took the exam at a US-based center - MD47.) Part of the problem is Prometric's old computers, but that's not wholly their fault.
Any chance that any of us who had problems with the DnD questions fouling up our experience will not have those questions count against us?
 
Pradeep bhatt
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I am surprised that d n d problem occuring in US as well. My machine was a win 98.
 
Theodore Casser
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Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
I am surprised that d n d problem occuring in US as well. My machine was a win 98.


Believe it or not... the center I was at is using Windows95 still. I suspect that's part of the problem, but that should be something that was factored in to the test design - that some test centers are certainly well behind the curve in updating their computers.
 
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