Most Difficult Part?

[Jorge Blaz]

Hi,
which topic you consider the most difficult part or the one you have to pay more attention to while studing for SCJP2?
Maybe Threads and Inner Classes are the most difficult parts...
[ February 12, 2004: Message edited by: Jorge Blaz ]

[Bert Bates]

Threads, inner classes and, believe it or not, garbage collection

[Yosi Hendarsjah]

Threads and inner classes.

[Jorge Blaz]

Yes, and maybe these two (Threads and Inner Classes) are also the less funny topics to learn, maybe because of their complexity.
But what is sure is that Threads and Inner Classes are very powerful elements among the Java language, so it's really good they are included in the SCJP2 exam.

[Thomas De Vos]

I thought I throw the following figures into this discussion, I think they are very useful figures but they are of course debatable.
If you want to have a rough idea the difficulty for each SCJP 1.4 objective then have a look at the last table. If you want to see which objective is the easiest then look at the first table.

This list present the total of correct answers we have received the last month based upon almost 400.000 questions answered.
The lists below exclude the questions that aspirants did not answer.

                  Objective                          | TotalCorrect
----------------------------------------------+----------------
 Language Fundamentals                           |          33220
 Flow Control, Assertions, Exception Handling |         28191
 Declarations and Access Control                 |          25861
 Garbage Collection                                 |           25499
 Operators and Assignments                       |          25480
 [B]Threads[/B]                                      |                   24413
 Overloading,Overriding,Runtime Type          |          23821
 Fundamental classes in the java.lang Package |        22018
 The Collections Framework                    |              21789

The following list is based on the same figures as the previous table but for the questions incorrectly answered.

                  Objective                   |    TotalInCorrect
----------------------------------------------+----------------
 Declarations and Access Control              |          11778
 Flow Control, Assertions, Exception Handling |       11725
 The Collections Framework                    |           10327
 Language Fundamentals                        |          10211
 Fundamental classes in the java.lang Package |     9994
 Overloading,Overriding,Runtime Type          |        7900
 [B]Threads[/B]                                         |               7716
 Operators and Assignments                    |           7176
 Garbage Collection                           |               5041

Based on the figures Threads isn't the most difficult objective, however I do agree that Threads is difficult but I can only imagine that people really focus on the difficult parts and forget the so called easy objectives when preparing for the exam.
[ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Thomas De Vos ]

[Jorge Blaz]

Yes, the figures show good points.
I agree with you that people focus more on the difficult parts and forget to study more the easy ones, althougt is very relative which ones are difficult and which ones are easy, it depends on everyone.
According to the figures, Collections should be the most difficult part. Although Collections is not an easy part, in my opinion is really funny to study them.
Thanks for the figures, Thomas :-)

[Thomas De Vos]

Absolutely the degree of difficulty of an objective totally depends on each person individually.
But the most important thing is that you need to identify your weakness, once you have discovered your personal weakness it will become your strength. This is what we have achieved with the websites to outline each aspirants weakness and strength.

[Bert Bates]

My answer is based more on anecdotal evidence, monitoring this forum and the results forum over time. The difficulty with using Thomas' data is that it assumes those mock questions accurately depict the real exam questions. If you go back and read results posted in the results forum, you'll see how people did on the actual exam.

[Thomas De Vos]

Bert,
I agree completely. That was one of the reasons I included in my previous post that the figures are debatable.
There are many factors that play a role to identify the grade of difficulty based on figures.
This is the same with all the figures you use, you can turn them the way you want, manipulate them, set them to your hand, they do give an indication and definitely does not count for the majority of people who takes the exam.

[Jessica Sant]

So just to put things in perspective a bit -- I turned Thomas' chart into % of incorrect answers
[ #incorrect / (#correct+#incorrect) ]

                                 % incorrect
Garbage Collection            |  16.5062213
Operators and Assignments     |  21.9745223
Language Fundamentals         |  23.5108563
Threads                       |  24.0156868
Overloading,Overriding...     |  24.9046373
Flow Control, Assertions...   |  29.3741858
java.lang Package             |  31.2195427
Declarations and Access       |  31.2920109
The Collections Framework     |  32.155312

Ha -- and I just looked up my %'s from my exam -- and Collections, java.lang and Flow Control were my worst 3 sections -- pretty consistent with this data. However in my head I felt the Threads/InnerClasses stuff was tougher.
[ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Jessica Sant ]

[Thomas De Vos]

Fair point Jessica.
I knew before I made these figures that the ratio of answered questions within each objective where more or less equal. With a maximum of 10% difference between the most answered and the least questions solved (or not solved).
The list shows the total of incorrect answered questions in relation of the total answered questions in each objective.

The Collections Framework                       31.12%
Declarations and Access Control                 30.76%
Fundamental classes in the java.lang Package30.48%
Flow Control, Assertions, Exception Handling28.25%
Overloading,Overriding,Runtime Type         24.31%
Threads                                        23.48%
Language Fundamentals                        23.12%
Operators and Assignments                  21.44%
Garbage Collection                        16.32%

Hopefully these figures are helping someone to prepare for their certification.
Jessica, I just saw your update on this post. I'm taking a feed from the live database when calculating so they differ a few percentages,
[ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Thomas De Vos ]

[Jessica Sant]

yea -- I had a fair # of edits to my post -- thanks for the accurate percentages

[Hans B�r]

passed the exam yesterday, most difficult part in my opinion: garbage collection. got 66% there, the other parts between 80% and 100%.