as you can read above, Pete from uCertify promised in his post on May 22, 2009 that many things had been fixed. Martijn and I tested it again, and there were still many errors. So I don’t know if it’s worth being tested again.

If you do, please keep us up to date :-)

Kai

Kai, thanks for informing me. Pete, thanks for the offer. However, a refund will not be necessary. Like I wrote earlier, the kit is not expensive at all. It has been my pleasure to give feedback. The casual reader of my posts above could find them to be too negative. So I would like to restate:

*The user interface en look and feel of the prepkit is very good. The best I know if. The quality of the content should be improved.*

So like Kai, I am also looking forward to the improved content. Who knows, maybe I will take on the webservices certification next (allready passed the SCWCD) and might use your kit as an aid.

Martijn

thanks for the information. I informed Martijn about the refund. I do not have any contact information of April.

I’m looking forward to the fixes of the content, as the engine itself is quite nice. Most errors can probably be found by going through user comments (although there are certainly false positives, some from myself).

Kai

Thank you for a balanced and unbaised discussion regarding this PrepKit. We have and will cotninue to listen to you carefully. I have asked my team to put this PrepKit under review and we commit to a releasing new version of this PrepKit by Nov 15, 2009.

April and Martijn, I would like to offer you 100% refund. Please contact me at pete at ucertify.com so that we can process your refund. Again, we appreciate your feedback.

Kai,
Great blog. Thank you.

congratulations!

The I took the SCWCD 1.4 (CX-310-081) years ago. Some people are disappointed, because the current version is almost unchanged. It does not contain any specific frameworks like JSP, just the raw Servlet & JSP spec. Still very useful, it helps me all the time.

Good Luck!

Today I passed the exam, with a 85% score. I think I spotted one incorrect question in the exam and left a comment. This specific question contained a code example with an @AllowRoles annotation. To my knowledge there is no such annotation and it should have read @RolesAllowed. No kudos for Sun on that one.

I can recommend Suns ePractice exams. A bit expensive, 80 Euros for two exams. but in some regions you get a 15% discount if you are a member of the SCJP LinkedIn group (only Belgium, Netherlands an Luxembourg if I am correct). The questions reflect the actual exam fairly well. However nobody is perfect, because I managed to find one or two qrong questions in the ePractice exams as well and there was one question that had incorrect HTML (the exams are web based) so you couldn’t read part of the exhibited deployment descriptor and had to go to “view source” mode of the browser).

I was a bit suprised do find out that the questions on the actual exam are presented in a random order whereas the the ePractice exams follow the order of the exam objectives. It would have been better for te ePractice exams to present the questions in random order as well.

Last point of criticism on ePractice: the user interface apears to come directly out of the stone age. Very basic, so to speak.

Maybe uCertify and Sun should team up creating a new prepkit? ;-)

Well, I will be taking on the web components or web services exam next. Wish me luck.

Final note to uCertify: like Kai mentioned: the software and the way in which the content and questions are presented is great. The price is right. Not expensive at all. But the content is sub standard. I suspect that the content and questions are written by editiors that do not have the specific certification and do not have practical experience with the topics at hand, but are just turning the pages of the specifications and inventing questions along the way. Please improve the content.

–Martijn

I think you can edit your posts when you register before you post. The register link is: http://witte-consulting.com/blog/wp-login.php?action=register

Registering also gives you a 10 % discount for your next uCertify prepkit, rofl

No offense, uCertify guys. Great software, friendly PR, poor content.

Martijn, please let us know how Sun’s ePractice worked for you.

–Martijn

It has never been my intention to start a flame war, but I just downloaded the new version and am sorry to report that the questions have not been corrected in any noticable way. Just like Kai, I tagged some of the obvious errors and was able to quickly verify that they had not been corrected. My prepkit version engine has version no 12.26.05 and the prepkit version is 8.02.05.

Just a few examples:
- The diagram i talked about still has PostDestroy and PreConstruct annotations (there are no such annotations)
- Another question is missing the “ctx.” in “ctx.getBusinessObject” in its answers (a minor error, but nonetheless an error)
- one of the questions still states that a statefull SB can be a timedObject (it cannot, as you know)
- in one of the jpql questions salary and amount get mixed up (according to d=the kit “where salary between 2000 and 3000″ is the equivalent of “where e.salary >= 2000 and e.AMOUNT <=3000″)
- one of the jpql queries reads “select * from …”. Kai also spotted this one. His remark pops up in my prepkit (was that intentional?)
- Well, a bright spot: there was a drag and drop question where the correct answer contained an item that was not in the drag list. This indeed seems to have been fixed (Q about element), or maybe I saw it wron the first time around.
- the “learn mode” tekst of one of the interceptor questions says that a lifecycle callback can be final. Guess what? They cannot.

I stopped using the prepkit after going through all the 11 “Study and Learn” steps (which in concept is a really fantastic approach to studying), taking the diagnostic test and test A. Then I was so dissapointed that I quit. So I did not even see all of the questions. I did not take the rest of the tests mainly due to the poor quality of the questions, the quizzes and the accompanying texts. A shame, really. Because the kit really looks slick and - had the content been up to standards - would have helped me a lot. Now I am sorry that I have to say that I cannot use it. I bought Suns ePractice exams instead.

I am sorry I could not come to a more positive conclusion.