10th of June, I had my certification exam for the 1Z0-811 Java Foundations, and I passed.
As I have been programming in Java for more than a decade, even professionally so, I wasn't exactly surprised. This should be a walk in the park, as this exam is intended for students or "those who are just beginning their Java careers".
This exam gives you 60 questions in 120 minutes. Most questions are radio buttons, but a few (for me, it was about 5) questions were "select two" or "select three".
A few of the questions were dated, as the exam is a few years old - I got a question about Java Web Start, which was deprecated in Java 9 and removed in 11.
Of my 60 questions, about two third were "look at this code and tell me what it prints". Roughly half of them had the options compilation error or runtime exception, while the rest didn't.
On the OCA exam, which I took some years back, I got the feeling that they tried to trick me on every question, and that all the code snippets were intended to be obscure. When the exam asked "What would be the result of this code", I was tempted to answer the poor colleague reviewing your pull request would stop by and ask if you were ok and why the heck you were writing code like that.
This time, I only got that feeling on less than ten questions.
How did I prepare for this exam? I walked through the practical details on how to do the exam, like installing a browser extension and such, and I skimmed the list of exam topics. I read a few blog posts from other people that had taken the exam, and I went through 15-20 mock exam questions. In total, I spent less than an hour on everything.
My strategy was the usual one: answer each question, reminding myself to read everything carefully. Whenever I found a question hard, I marked it for review, and went on to the next one.
In about 50 minutes, I was through, and I had 13 questions marked for review. As I was pretty confident that I was way above the passing threshold, I went through the marked questions once more, for about ten minutes, and then submitted my answers.
I had to download a program before I started, which made sure I shared my screen all the time. I also disconnected my external monitor, made sure I was home alone, and that was it.
During the exam, I had at one occasion a connection issue, according to the exam application. That resulted in a pop-up on the screen for 10-15 seconds telling me to wait. I sat still and waited, and once the hickup was over, I continued the exam.
On one of the tougher questions, I had to think a bit. Sometimes during heavy thinking, I sit with the hands to my forehead, looking down, kind of like many chess players. A couple of seconds into this position, I got a chat message from the proctor saying that I should look at the screen, not down or away, and that the exam would be paused.
Looking at the screen for two hours (if you use all your available time) without breaks is heavy, so I'm curious on how strict they enforce this. In my case, I answered in the chat that I was sorry, but I was just thinking, and was told to continue the exam.
I took this exam because I had a free exam attempt from Oracle, but I didn't have the time to prepare for the heavier exams like Java 25. My reasoning sounded it's better to take this exam than no exam.
And I got this nice badge.
