SCJP5 (Tiger) , Generics and Concurrency

Took the Sun beta exam for SCJP5 (Tiger) yesterday. I had this free voucher and we were having knowledge sharing sessions on new Tiger features at work - which kind of helped me make my decision but the real point of attraction was the long 5 hour torture! I really wanted to see if I could stand the 5 hour marathon exam with 160+ questions. And I guess I made it even though I got burned out at the end! About after 4 hours into the test I could look at the questions and realize that it is a simple one, but couldn't get myself to concentrate enough to pick the right answer !!! Especially the ones with exhibits (code) - I didn't even bother to click those. I really wonder what the exam authors were thinking when they designed this mammoth. I mean it would be pretty hard to make a fair judgment on the difficulty level based on the test takers performance. Well.. Unless you go to the extreme extent of time slotting exam and judge difficulty level separately for each slots - provided the test engine is capable of capturing all necessary inputs for such an exhaustive analysis!


Content wise I think the exam was pretty tough - lots of generic and autoboxing stuff from the new feature side. But the ones that I got beaten up was the thread ones - not too tough technically but a whole set of lengthy code exhibits combined with the dreaded "this code will not compile/complier error" as a valid option makes them really really hard! However bit of a disappointment with the new concurrency stuff - not even a single question related to any of the new util.concurrent package or the new concurrent collections. Even though it is not explicitly mentioned in the exam objectives, I was expecting a few questions as I think this is one of the most important addition - maybe even more important than generics from a usability perspective. I mean this is stuff that we, Java developers, have been missing for a long time. Btw the drag and drop questions were fun - they have got it right this time and I really enjoyed those.


Anyway now that I'm done with it, I am happy I took it. And the news today at javaranch
is that the beta deadline got extended until March 6 - So plenty of time still if you want to take it - costs only 50$ instead of the regular 150$. But here's my advise - wait for the official 2 hour(or so) exam - because this five hour torture is definitely not worth it.