I can tell you with absolute certainty that there will NOT be any questions that simply have a missing semicolon or curly brace in normal syntax, with the exception of PERHAPS anonymous inner class questions (and they won't be like the stupid one that is from our book that Marlene caught!!).
And the exam is old enough now that any potential typos have been long since fixed. If you see something that would not compile, it is *supposed* to be a wrong answer.
We were occasionally a little cruel in the trickiness of the questions, but not *that* mean.
In fact, the only reason the questions have become tricky is because the exam has been out for such a long time, and there are only so many ways in which to ask a particular question, that we had to get awfully creative to figure out a different way to get at the same thing. And sometimes what we *thought* was creative turned out to be a little too convoluted, but that's why the passing percentage is a whole lot lower on this version. So, as the exam gets a little tougher, it is balanced out with a lower passing percentage.
Also, you are not tested on trivia to see if you recognize how a particular JVM implementation reports an error, for example. That is why the questions are worded:
Compilation fails BECAUSE of an error on line...
rather than saying:
Compilation fails AT line ...
because we don't know what line your compiler will use to *report* the error, but we do know for certain where it all went wrong...
So try to relax. Marlene already knows about 10 billion things beyond what is on the exam, but she has expressed in the past that it is important to her to deeply understand how it really works (something that will serve her well both on the exam and forever after in her
Java life.) On the other hand, many folks just want to pass the exam with any reasonable score. Everyone has different goals for the exam. Just know that you do not have to achieve absolute complete Java guru status to pass the exam. It is difficult, definitely, but not insanely hard
I know I've said this a lot before, but many of us at Sun were quite happy just to pass, because it was a requirement at the time just to get a job interview and we figured we'd have time to learn the rest later. That was me in 1997 taking the SCJP for Java 1.1 exam, and I won't tell you what I scored, but let's say it wasn't anything I'd be bragging about on javaranch these days... which is why I eventually became a member of the exam development teams.
So that I could avoid actually having to TAKE the tests
Cheers,
Kathy