John O Sullivan

Jesse Silverman wrote:One more thing.

When posting OCJP-related stuff use the forum over here:
https://coderanch.com/f/24/java-programmer-OCPJP

Why?  Many of the same people respond in both forums?

There are all sorts of things you might see on the exam where people will just show you a better way to do what you are asking about when in (this) the "Java In General" forum.

Questions in that other forum will be answered with the knowledge that you are explicitly preparing for the cert exam, so that you won't hear "Don't do that -- do this instead" or "Why do you even care about that?"

It will be clear that you are interested in that thing for the exam, which precludes the first comment and answers the second question.

Occasionally, what you are asking will be known by those familiar with the exam to be out-of-scope for it, in which case you might be happy to hear that (of course many of those things are useful to know "for real life").

Thanks for this. I was trying to find where to post about it but was/am having trouble navigating a bit.
I'll post there in future.

Jesse Silverman wrote:You seem to have a decent sense of which ones you probably got wrong, and that "understood everything, but only memorized some of it" was mostly to blame.

I have heard that the list of topics they give you with your grade seems so all over the place and unfocused that it is next to useless -- is that the case for you?

Interestingly, it wasn't just the time?  i.e. Even if you had 3 minutes per question you feel you might have failed?

For me, getting FAST enough is probably the hardest part.  It is so easy to accidentally let 4 or 5 minutes go by on a question you couldn't even afford 2 on...then you are under ridiculous time pressure the rest of the exam...

EDIT -- did you only take the chapter review tests in the book, or did you buy and try any of their or Enthuware or other mock tests??  It seems like you should have realized you were in trouble before seating for the exam?

Hi Jesse Silverman,
The list of topics, I haven't gotten use out of, but really it's because I cant bring myself to read over it in any detail.
Time wasn't a big issue for me, being used to the tougher examples, I was able to choose an answer with as much certainty as I could have for each question and move on
There were a few minutes left over for review at the end.
I was lucky in that regard, as I do often feel time pressure on exams.

I am not aware of Enthuware but will have to look into it. The book comes with a link for a testbank with Chapter questions, review questions and 4 mock exams. There is a lot there to work on there, I had completed a total 0f 26% of the questions including all the mock exams. So there is more to go.

Should I have known I was in trouble. I wasn't certain how I would fare, but wasn't surprised to fail.
There are areas of the subject matter I know I am still weak on, but am usually pretty optimistic going into exams.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Sorry about your misfortune, but thank you for giving us information. Information about unsuccessful exams is particularly luableva because so few people supply it.
How long was your preparation period? What sort of marks weere you getting in the mock tests? Did you sit the 1Z0‑819 exam?

Thanks for the kind words, Campbell Ritchie,
Yes it was the 1Z0‑819 exam, I prepared for 3 months,
On the mock exams, I got between 39-56%, going off this I guess I should have known I wasn't fully prepared.
I will give it another 2-3 months of preparation and see if I feel more ready.

Thanks for the input both of you.
Any more input is welcome.

I took the OCP exam earlier this month and wanted to let you know how it went.
I got 53% a fail well below the 68% pass mark.

I've been following the Study Guide material from Boyarsky and Selikoff and using the test bank questions.
The prep tests were much harder in regards to reading code, finding issues and choosing the right answers.
Thanks to this I felt the actual exam questions were very achievable.

Where I fell down most was needing to know signatures. There's a memorisation part which I was pretty unprepared for.
My focus going forward I guess will be to go back through the material and begin memorisation of all methods, classes, interfaces I can manage.
Though I don't believe that will be enough to get me past.

They provided me with a list of objectives to focus on.
Is there a way to use these to know which sections of the study guide to read through, other than figuring it out myself?
Any other tips on how to move forward following this?

Regards

Congratulations Nani.

The exam had a lot of very straight forward questions, and some difficult ones. A lot of modules and arrays. I expected less questions on exceptions. And of course tons of OOP / Streams. Little to none of IO/NIO (which I think is the most difficult topic), Security, JDBC, Localization. Some Concurrency. Question with FileChannel showed up.

This was exactly my experience of the exam, taking it today as well. The only difference being there wasn't an awful lot of questions on Streams. There were questions that included them but didn't require deep knowledge of them. Only 2 that required working knowledge of them. Everything else though just the same.