1Z0-819 Exam Feedback

[Ervin Szilagyi]

Hi everyone,

I've just finished my 1Z0-819 exam passing it with a score of 82%.

First of all I want to thank for Scott and Jane for their excellent study guides and for their blog posts. Their work is the most reliable source on the internet if anyone wants to pass this exam.

My background: I work as a full stack developer using Java for the back-end. I have 4+ years experience in full-stack development plus a few years of doing coding in C++.
Initially I bought a voucher to be able to register for 1Z0-815 in the end of the summer, also planning to do the 1Z0-816 next year. Unfortunately I had to delay my exam for a while. When I finally registered, I found out that my exam purchase was automatically promoted to 1Z0-819 and also my purchase is valid until 31 December (today). So I had to re-plan everything.

My learning path:
-initially I went trough the OCP Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 11 Programmer I Study Guide. I've done all the tests from Wiley Efficient Learning.
-I bought the 1Z0-815 test bundle from whizlabs.com. They were certainly ok, but they also have a lot of questions which may seem out of topic. Also I've noticed that the type parameters are missing from some questions' source code, but being a bundle for 1Z0-815, it was not that of a big deal.
-finding out that my exam was promoted to 1Z0-819, I've bought the second book for Java SE 11 Programmer II. I've done all the tests from Wiley Efficient Learning for programmer II as well.
-I also bought the 1Z0-816 test bundle from whizlabs, but I found to be borderline unusable since all the type parameters are removed from the questions making a lot of them unsolvable. I've contacted them a few times, it seems they do not really care respond. So please avoid this bundle.

While this passing result certainly makes me happy, I'm also somewhat disappointed about the structure of this exam:
- 90 minutes is a bit short for this exam. I think having 120 minutes would be the ideal solution here. I managed to finish all the questions in 65-70 minutes, but I marked for review a lot of them. In the end I managed to revisit all of those marked, but certainly I did not have time to go through every question again.
- for the JDBC question I had a callable statement with 2 parameters and with setObject. For everyone, who is still learning, please don't skip this part from the book.
- I had a question with doPrivileged. It was mainly related to a potential vulnerability, this article covers everything we need to know: https://www.selikoff.net/2020/11/05/819-security/
- most of my questions were class design, generics and streams


Some tips which I found useful:
- if the question has a lot of source code in it, read the answers first and focus on the lines mentioned by the potential answer choices
- if the answers don't have a "Does not compile" choice, don't focus on proving to yourself whatever the code compiles or not. Just focus on the lines mentioned by any potential answers.
- watch the clock, skip the long questions and come back later.

[Tom Huynh]

Impressive score, congratulations and thanks for the practical tips and the learning path insights.

It seems that you only used the OCP I & II Study Guides. Is that true?

Can you tell something about  the practising part?  What  was your learning/practising ratio for example?

[Paul Anilprem]

Congratulations on passing and thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!

[Ervin Szilagyi]

Tom Huynh wrote:Impressive score, congratulations and thanks for the practical tips and the learning path insights.

It seems that you only used the OCP I & II Study Guides. Is that true?

Can you tell something about  the practising part?  What  was your learning/practising ratio for example?

Thank you.

Yes, I used OCP I & II Study Guides. I bought both of them, although there is a a complete edition now containing the material from both books in one. When I ordered the first book, I didn't know that the exams will be merged. So, I had to order the second one separately as well.

I studied for around 8 weeks for the exam. I spend an average 2 hours per day, mainly after work. I spent around 2 weeks for the OCP I material, afterwards I moved to OCP II. A went through every chapter from each book, after each chapter I've done the questions. I used SybexTest (https://www.efficientlearning.com/) for the questions after each chapter.

After I finished the second book, I've done the Assessment Test and the bonus exams. I've re-read the chapters where I struggled the most with the questions (mainly io, nio2 and modularization). As I said I started to solve the exams from whizlabs, but I did not finished all of them, since a lot of the questions where very low quality.

I've spent around 40% studying and reading the books (and sometimes the Oracle Java documentation as well). I've spent around 60% doing mock exams. Yes, this implies doing at least twice the questions from SybexTest, but lets be honest, they have 460 questions just for OCP II book, so you cant really memorize all of them.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Welcome to the Ranch

Have a cow ←link for supplying so much useful information about your revision.

[Ervin Szilagyi]

I've also received my badge today: https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/d24ba586-7589-488b-ac86-2b5ae49e994a?

Pretty cool!

[Charles O'Leary]

Ervin Szilagyi wrote:I've also received my badge today: https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/d24ba586-7589-488b-ac86-2b5ae49e994a?

Pretty cool!

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Congrats!

[Tom Huynh]

Thanks for your extensive insights.

Just to be clear. You mentioned you have 4+ year of full-stack development.
How many years was Java development. Also the full 4+ years or just a part?

I am asking this because I just started with Java development actually. Going for the OCP would take a long time for me, but I am willing to take that road. Easy does it (is my mantra).

[Scott Selikoff]

Congratulations!!  That's excellent news!  And a great score to boot.

Per the comment about Callable statement... they aren't supposed to be in scope.  It's possible you got an experimental question.  Not all questions on an exam count toward your score.

[Ervin Szilagyi]

Tom Huynh wrote:Thanks for your extensive insights.

Just to be clear. You mentioned you have 4+ year of full-stack development.
How many years was Java development. Also the full 4+ years or just a part?

I am asking this because I just started with Java development actually. Going for the OCP would take a long time for me, but I am willing to take that road. Easy does it (is my mantra).

I started working as a full-stack developer (Java/Spring/Angular) at the end of 2016. Just to be clear here, your experience as a developer would matter in cases were you have to read and understand code. I don't think that you have to have years of experience as a developer in order to pass this exam. If you do enough preparation and invest sufficient enough time in learning and even memorizing some of the APIs required for the exam, you would pass without issues.

According to Oracle it is recommended to have 2-3 years of experience for an OCP exam. This should not discourage anybody. I know a some companies which pay for OCA-OCP certifications for junior developers who just started to work in the fields. Usually they pass without major difficulties.  

Scott Selikoff wrote:Congratulations!!  That's excellent news!  And a great score to boot.

Per the comment about Callable statement... they aren't supposed to be in scope.  It's possible you got an experimental question.  Not all questions on an exam count toward your score.

I was thinking about this as well. I got 50 questions in total with that one being the only one having anything to do with JDBC. The final report mentions that I was able to answer correctly the questions related to JDBC.
I might be a ungraded question, I don't know.

[Tom Huynh]

Ervin Szilagyi wrote:

I started working as a full-stack developer (Java/Spring/Angular) at the end of 2016. Just to be clear here, your experience as a developer would matter in cases were you have to read and understand code. I don't think that you have to have years of experience as a developer in order to pass this exam. If you do enough preparation and invest sufficient enough time in learning and even memorizing some of the APIs required for the exam, you would pass without issues.

According to Oracle it is recommended to have 2-3 years of experience for an OCP exam. This should not discourage anybody. I know a some companies which pay for OCA-OCP certifications for junior developers who just started to work in the fields. Usually they pass without major difficulties.  

Your insights comforts me. As I just started with Java but I do have programming experience in other languages.
There is one doubt though. You achieved a relatively high score of 83%. This makes me think that you are quit easy learner, by just studying 2 hours per day.

[Ervin Szilagyi]

Jeanne said she was also learning for AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, which by itself is a huge topic. Because an  OCP exam has a lot of stuff which you have to memorize (APIs, command line commands with arguments) and you don't use them every day on the job, it is understandable that you forgot some material. Doing a lot of preparation just before the exam is and focusing just on the OCP material is a helps a lot. Jeanne also said she was focusing on the questions in order to give feedback to the readers and assess if their current printed material is still valid for the preparation.

Besides, people are different, some can memorize abstract concepts more easily than others, other people can solve practical questions having fewer difficulties. Nevertheless, the exam will test you on both.

82% is certainly a good score, but so is 72% and basically every score above 68%. Also, there are other people who achieved beyond 90%, but this should not really matter in the end. You have to answer 34 questions correctly from 50 in order to become certified, which is certainly possible.

[Tom Huynh]

In my initial reply I included Jeanne’s score. Later I indeed discovered her second blog post about how she prepped. Hence I quickly edited my post and removed it.

However it seems that you were quick enough to see my original post. . Nevertheless. You are totally right about score’s. They are Personal and maybe me comparison shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

As she’s said.  “A pass is a pass”.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Ervin,
Jeanne also said she was struggling to think/focus during a pandemic . I don't think my score was reflective of anything here. I still passed because I know the material well. But it was not good timing for me to be taking a test on anything.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Tom,
No worries. I wouldn't have put the score on the internet if it was a secret

[Christine Salvador]

My first programming languange that I learned is C++

[Campbell Ritchie]

CS: welcome to the Ranch