Category Archives: Java/Java EE

Jeanne’s impressions of the Java Foundations Certified Junior Associate

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Update: I’ve created a new version of this blog post comparing the Java Foundations exam to the Java 11 OCP.

I took the Java Foundations Certified Junior Associate exam to see how it relates the “regular” OCA (Oracle Certified Associate) exam. The objectives show an interesting mix of conceptual and hands on knowledge. Mostly hands on.

My beta exam was 101 questions in 3 hours. I finished in an hour. I spent another 40 minutes doing a review and fixed one incorrect answer. There were a few questions where the question was wrong, but it is a beta. And they let you report such issues to make the test better.

I’m an experienced Java developer. Why did I take a basic exam you ask? Two reasons.

  1. I was curious who the exam was designed for. This post answers this question.
  2. I wanted to see if Scott and my OCA 8 book could be used by people studying for this exam. The answer is yes with a tiny bit of supplemental material. See this post for details.

I went to a testing center I had disliked in the past because they had a free slot and I figured this test was so easy I wouldn’t need to concentrate. I’m happy to report that the testing center (Horizon of Flushing) fixed its problems. The room was quiet and well ventilated. They still wanted me to empty the tissues from my pockets, but at least had lockers.

The three exams

There are three intro exams right now. Here’s a comparison:

Exam Number Exam Name Allowed as Pre-req to OCP (professional exam) My comments on intended audience
1Z0-850 Java 5 or 6 Associate No This exam was meant for managers to show a working vocabulary and grasp of Java. There was a tiny bit of code, but it was mostly concepts and pseudocode.
1Z0-803 Java 7 OCAJP (associate) Yes, for OCPJP 7 This is the entry level exam for Java 7 to the developer track. It involves lots of code.
1Z0-808 Java 8 OCAJP (associate) Yes, for OCPJP 8 This is the entry level exam for Java 8 to the developer track. It involves lots of code.
1Z0-811 Junior Associate/Java Foundations No Oracle says it is meant for interns or entry level folks. I think they would be better served by taking the actual OCA. It’s within grasp with no experience, shows more knowledge of Java, sounds better and allows an upgrade to the OCP when the candidate is ready.

Quotes from Oracle

According to the Java Foundations Certified Junior Associate exam description, the exam is:

Position yourself to enter the workforce, or get the internship of your dreams with marketable Java skills.

Earning the Java Foundations Certified Junior Associate credential arms you withthe fundamentalsof Java programming,enabling you to demonstrate both conceptual knowledge and skills. Certification alsovalidates your capabilities to a future employer, showing your potential to become an increasingly valuable asset to any company as you progress into OCA level during your early stage of employment, and later to OCP.

This Junior Associate certification is focused on students in secondary schools, two-year colleges and four year colleges and universities who have participated in the Oracle Academy program and/or are studying computer science including relevant Java curricula and faculty members who teach foundational Java and computer science classes.

Though the exam does not assume any hands-on professional experience with Java, tobe successful you will need a basic understanding of Java programming language and concepts and have mathematical, logical, and analytical problem-solving skills. In addition, you must know how to write and execute a Java program and work with the Java Development kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Earning this certificationdemonstrates fluency in and a solid understanding of Java SE and the Java programming language, including: data types; operators and strings; decision and looping statements; classes, constructors, and methods; exceptions, ArrayLists and the Math class.

The problem is that the Regular Oracle Certified Associate Java Programmer certification says:

The Java SE 8 Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) certification helps you build a foundational understanding of Java, while expanding your knowledge of general programming.

The ideal candidate who would earn this certification typically has a technical background and wants to improve programming skills, or may be new to object-oriented programming and Java.

And the old Java 5/6 Associate exam says:

The Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 5/SE 6 certification provides an ideal entry into an application development or a software project management career using Java technologies. This worldwide credential validates basic knowledge of Object-Oriented Concepts, UML representation of OO concepts, the Java programming language, and general knowledge of Java Platforms and Technologies. Candidates for this exam include: entry level Java programmers, students studying to become Java programmers, project or program managers working with Java technology in the software development industry.

The old Java 5/6 associate exam didn’t involve much code so this made sense.

good customer service – two examples

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I’ve blogged a couple times about poor customer service (Verizon/Time Warner.) I had two nice experiences with customer service today.

Southwest

I had booked a flight on Southwest Airlines for a trip and the date of the trip changed. Southwest has a policy that you can change your flight without penalty – and just pay any increase in fare. I had paid $25 for Early Boarding roundtrip. I assumed this was tied to the flight and I’d have to pay again when I changed the flight.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had the same confirmation # for the new flight and the Early Boarding remained intact.

MicroCenter

MicroCenter has a “ordered online; pick up in store” option. This is nice because you don’t waste a trip to the store only to find out they are out of something. I ordered a “kit” that consisted of two pieces. The kit sold for $8. I got an email from the manager that the inventory system was wrong and they couldn’t locate the kit. However, equivalents existed to the two pieces in the kit. One for $3 and one for $15. He said I they would honor the price of the kit and sell it to me for $8. Half price!

jeanne’s java 8 upgrade exam experience

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On Friday, I took the Java 8 Upgrade exam beta.

As I did with the OCPJP 7 and OCAJP 8, I’m going to take a stab at guessing my score. I’ll edit this post when I know my actual score.  I think I got between 75% and 85%.
I got a 66% on the upgrade exam, but an 88% on the full exam which I more prepared for. (passing is 65% so I barely passed) I think I was overconfident. As I gained more experience (after the exam) both through using Java 8 and writing the chapters for our OCP book, I realized the topic was far deeper than I realized when studying for the exam. Also, I spent a lot of time studying Nashorn which I didn’t know at all before the objectives came out. Didn’t get any questions wrong on that. I also had mis-read the date/time objectives and didn’t know a good number of the APIs when taking the exam. Know them now!

How did I study?

Topic How studied
Inner classes Re-read that Advanced Class design chapter in the draft version of our OCP book. Also re-read the draft of our section on effectively final
Lambdas/filtering/collections/streams Re-read the parts of the functional programming chapter I had drafted along with my outline for the rest. (This is a big chapter and it isn’t finished yet. We do have the key points listed though which shows what to study/look for)My favorite book for learning these topics in the first place is Java 8 for the Really Impatient. Also Java 8 New Features is good. I also used the lambda tutorial to learn from originally.I’ve been doing a good bit of functional programming in Groovy in addition to learning lambdas deeply for Java. I felt prepared for this part of the exam. Which is good because it is a large percentage of the exam.
Static/default methods on interfaces Read the sections on interfaces in our OCA book and re-did the mock questions.
Java 8 Date/Time API Read the sections on Java 8 Dates in our OCA book and re-did the mock questions.Note: I completely missed the fact that the upgrade exam covers ZonedDateTime (and daylight savings time.) This is not on the OCA and therefore not in our OCA book. If you aren’t from the US, I recommend remembering that in the US, we move the clocks forward one hour (there is no 2-2:59am) on one day in the spring and backward one hour (2am occurs twice) on one day in the fall.I hope they don’t put this on the OCP exam. I don’t think something that requires this knowledge of how United States daylight savings time works belongs on the exam.
Nashorn Unlike lambdas, my experience with Nashorn is that I read a chapter on it in Java 8 for the Really Impatient. When I found out it was on the upgrade exam, I started learning it more deeply. I didn’t think they were going to put it on the exam. It’s not a major part of the language.Anyway, I wrote up the key points for the chapter before taking the exam. This turned out to be good preparation.I have coded in JavaScript. Which helped with one question, but wasn’t a major contributor to getting these questions right on the exam.I also used the API from the tutorial along with the shell tutorial. (the shell scripting parts aren’t on the exam – the objectives don’t say they are, but I was skeptical. Glad to see they scoped this down at least).

And of course, I wrote a bunch of practice code.

Test day

The objectives list the beta as being 150-225 minutes. (quite the range.) That’s 2.5 to 3.75 hours. My exam was 3 hours. (I’m glad I didn’t get an even longer one. Three hours is a long time to sit!) In my three hour window I got 126 questions to answer. It took me two hours to go through my first pass of answering each question. I had about 20 to go back to. One good thing about having so many questions is that sometimes a fact you don’t remember is answered in another question. That happened for a few of mine. After I finished going back to those 20, I called it done. I didn’t review the others because I was tired. Did I mention three hours is a long time?

When I took the OCAJP 8 beta, there was new functionality where you could right click an answer to cross it out (strikethrough) in the exam itself. It didn’t work at that point, but it does now. I really like this feature. It was nice to be able to mark off answers as I read. This also meant I had less to write down on the markerboard during the exam.

I even used the cross out feature for some questions that I wasn’t going back to. if I was thinking about “process of elimination” I used it. Or even if the answers were long. Or I had to choose the best two or three answers. It was nice to have less to remember in my head!