I passed the 1Z0-829 today. The exam page still says “coming soon” and Scott didn’t see the 829 in the list of choices when he looked last night. I think the exam “wasn’t quite ready” and they pulled it back. (or accidentally released it too early). I guess I got to take it because I was registered already. I saw 5-6 errata on the exam which I have reported to Oracle.

COVID logistics

When I took the 819, I was asked to remove my mask twice – once for an ID check and once for a photo. This time, those steps were combined, so I only had to remove my mask once.

I hadn’t been to this test center before. It was walking distance and well set up. I was a good distance from any other test takers. The only problem I had was that I was right next to the radiator. It would have been hot even without a mask on. With a mask, I was sweating.

Other logistics

I was given a marker and since sheet to write on. I was not given an eraser. I asked for a second sheet and was given it though. (I write a lot.) The man in front of me asked for a second marker because it had run out once. They were flexible.

Some time ago, you could right click answers to cross them out of consideration. This feature is not yet back.

Time management

My first pass of the exam took 65 minutes. I then spent a good while examining and memorizing the questions that I believe to have errata. I didn’t get a chance to go through and sanity check my answers because I was tracking errata. If I wasn’t a cert book author, I’d have focused on review and gotten a higher score.

Getting the score

I got my score right when I submitted. (68%). I didn’t get a printout. But I didn’t need one since I had seen the score. My details were available on certview as soon as I got home as well.

You might notice the passing score is also 68%. Why so low you ask? A few reasons

• Some of the errata resulted in having to guess at the answer. For example a question saying to pick two correct answers had three correct answers. So i had to guess what the exam creators meant. (I have reported all of these to Oracle, there were a bunch)
• I didn’t check my answers because I was dealing with the above.
• A few questions were things I didn’t expect to be in scope. (They will be covered in the book.) This is one of the disadvantages of being a cert book author – you have to take the exam without a study guide.)

I felt way more confident about this exam than I did the 819 though. I like the question distribution better and I didn’t have a COVID lockdown cloud hanging over me.

Question Distribution

When taking an exam, you have to agree not to share what was on it. So no details about what was covered. Sharing the distribution of questions by objective is fair game though!

Note that this is approximate because of relying on memory. And also because some questions spanned objectives

Objective	# Questions
Handing date, time, text, numeric and boolean values	Lots
Controlling Program Flow	Lots
Utilizing Java Object-Oriented Approach	Lots
Handling Exceptions	3-5
Working with Arrays and Collections	4-6
Working with Streams and Lambda expressions	4-6
Package and deploy Java code and use the Java Platform Module System	4
Manage concurrent code execution	4
Use Java I/O API	4
Access databases using JDBC	2
Implement Localization	2

An important disclaimer about randomness

With only 50 questions, randomness is a bigger factor. This means you could easily not see questions on a topic. Or get more than someone else on another topic. Be careful as you read the experiences of people who have taken the exam. Just because they didn’t get a question on X doesn’t mean that you won’t! So you don’t get to skip studying topics.