Dan's exams vs. the Real Thing

[Ben Ritchie]

Hi
First off, thanks Dan for making such a useful set of exams available. I've been working through them, which has been a rather humbling experience and wondered how peopple found that they compared in difficulty to the real 1.4 exam?
After the first 13 exams, I'm typically getting 11-13 of 19 - that's a pass, but only just. I normally get two or three more 'almost' right (some questions have many right answers). I'm getting slightly better, but not fast. Hopefully there are two things in the real exam that will help - they tell you how many right answers there are (I would do a lot better in Dan's exam if I knew this) and there are none of those hard operator questions (i ^= --i |i++ >> i != etc....).
So, should I be depressed or happy at how I'm doing? I'm not looking to ace it, just to get this one out of the way so I can get on and do the Developer exam, which is the one that I think will really help me. Turning myself into a Human JVM isn't my idea of fun

[Dan Chisholm]

Ben,
I just took the exam myself on Wednesday. I found that the level of difficulty of the real exam is not as great as my exam. For example, there were no questions that require complete memorization of the operator precedence chart. For that reason, I will move those sorts of questions to an area of my exam that is marked optional. I will also move the control flow questions involving triple nested loops to the optional area.
Although the real exam does not require complete memorization of the operator precedence chart it does require a lot of memorization of methods and constructors of the classes in the java.lang package. The next version of my exam will contain a lot more of those questions.
The next version of my exam should be uploaded next week.

[eric lee]

Hi Den:
Hope you update your mock exam as soon as possible,i will take scjp exam soon.Thanks

[Ben Ritchie]

Still getting around 60% in these exams but got 87%, 82% and 78% on the mocks at jchq.net (skipping the AWT and I/O questions) . Hopefully those are close to the real thing...
Dan - the exam is booked for Tuesday so your update is probably too late for me, but I'll happily test drive it to compare. Much better to be too hard than too easy anyway
[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Ben Ritchie ]