I missed 9 questions out of 60.
80% Declarations, Initialization, and Scoping
90% Flow Control
85% API Contents
100% Concurrency
70% OO Concepts
87% Collections/Generics
88% Fundamentals
I used the
SCJP book by Katherine Sierra and Bert Bates, the
Rules Roundup here at JavaRanch, and
my own notes compiled while studying for the exam. I worked every example in the book, created a custom sort module which will be useful on the job, created many small
test programs, and performed many Google searches, as well. I'm just happy to have passed; I would even have been happy with the minimum passing score of 58%, because I REALLY didn't want to waste the 300 dollar testing fee, which came out of my own pocket. I feel the thing that helped the most, was actually compiling my own notes! There's nothing like writing something down, or explaining something to another person, for really understanding study material.
I studied for about 192 hours over a 6 week period, to ensure I didn't waste that $300. It may have been overkill, but not by much - some of the subtler aspects I discovered during that 6 weeks period, were on the exam, and had I not studied that long, I would have missed them.
A better score would have been nice, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I have some concerns about the quality control on the test. One of the questions asked 'Which 2 of these OO concepts are being illustrated?', yet gave me a radio button to pick two items! There's no way I could have answered that question correctly - I would have needed checkboxes to pick two answers, not radio buttons. Another question had as its function signature something like 'public int() SlapHappyCoding { // do something here; }', yet 'Do not compile' was not one of the available options. People who got 100% must not have gotten the questions I got.
I would say the questions on the test were equivalent to the easy-to-medium questions on the mock exams. The questions all seemed fair, and reasonable - I didn't encounter any questions like the ones I disliked from the mock exams, where you have to figure out this big long program, and calculate the correct answer, but STILL get it wrong because "you didn't import java.io.* up top! Har! Har!".
I don't know how much help the mock exams really were, in the big picture; after going through this process, I don't think they helped as much as I imagined they would. The first time I took them, I scored in the 50% area. I didn't feel too badly, because the tests contained new information that wasn't presented in the book, and several of the questions seemed unfair. The second time I took the mock exams, I got 95%, but at that point, how much of the score is due to knowing the material, and how much of it is recognizing the answers from the first time I took the test? It's like the mock exams are useful only once, but beware - they may come at the cost of gutting your self confidence. The main useful thing the mocks exams gave me, was this: be very, very careful in reading the wording on the question - sometimes they're not testing you on what you think they're testing you on.
..... really your comments are so usefull and also your syudy notes 
