The key I think to passing the SCJP, is to take as many practice exams as you can. I took the ones in the apress book(end of chapter), the sierra and bates book(chapter and practice exam and the extra free practice exam), the meyers test, the exams on Café 4 Java, Marcus Greens exam and some others too.

Many other posts tell you that when your scoring 10% over what you want to score on the practice tests that your ready to take the test. I thought that most of the practice exams I took were much harder and more purposely deceptive than the real test. I mean if it helps you catch weird stuff on the exam I guess, I just don't think this advice is accurate. 

As you probably know you need a 59% to pass the SCJP. On most practice tests I was scoring about 65-75% and on the actual test I scored an 81%.

 As with most people the area that I got the lowest scores was in the concurrency section, even though I thought I studied that pretty well. I think the issue there is that since I develop mostly web applications my exposure to threads is not on a day to day basis since I'm  writing for the web container. In that section I got a 62% and in all the other areas I was between 80 -90%.
 

The Sierra and Bates Book ( Co Creators of the Exam)

I thought this book was awesome preparation and I think it’s a fairly handy reference after the test. One complaint was that the binding of the book was pretty bad and it pretty much fell into several sections after a small amount of use.

Mock Exams

Some of the tests on this link are not for 1.5 I would focus on the 1.5 ones.

http://faq.javaranch.com/java/ScjpMockTests

 
I would try to take all of the tests at this link

http://faq.javaranch.com/java/ScjpFaq#mocks

 
Some additional mock exams

http://www.javaranch.com/maha/_Mock_Exams/_mock_exams.html

 Java Keywords

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_keywords

Add a comment

Posted by Robert Sinner on November 6, 2007 7:24:00 PM PST #