Tag Archives: certification

sybex’s new test bank website

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On November 14, 2024, switched to new test bank software. That means the mock exams and flashcards and the like are now on a new website.

If you are registering for the first time

Create an account

  1. Go to study.learning.wiley.com
  2. Click to create a new account

Register your book

  1. Click “Redeem Test Bank”
  2. Choose Sybex and the book you are using.
  3. Then answer a question about the book and you are in. The old PIN code system is no longer used

If you were already using the old site

  1. Go to study.learning.wiley.com
  2. Click to create a new account
  3. Login using your credentials from the old site

Note that any books you had registered that haven’t expired yet will appear. However, your progress/history on them will not.

Different than Real Exam

Be aware that the exam software is different than on the real exam. For example, the real exam lets you flag questions for later, navigate to specific questions, or end the exam from any question.

PASSED! Jeanne’s Experience Taking the SAFe ScrumMaster exam.

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Today I took the SAFe 6.0 ScrumMaster certification and passed with a score of 80%. Passing is 73%. I was optimizing for passing quickly and not investing a lot of time rather than a high score though.

My path to certification

As background, I’ve been a part time SM (and rest of the time developer) for over a decade and been on a SAFe team for a while.

  • Oct 21-24 – took SAFe6 training course – half a day each of the four days. It was online and I felt myself absorbing less each day. It’s hard to pay attention to people talking online for that long every day. I also felt the energy level of fellow students dropping both in the main classroom and in the breakouts. Which became a negative feedback loop.
  • Oct 24 – I was also helping get ready for a conference so my brain was somewhat distracted
  • Oct 25-27 – went on vacation. Didn’t think about SAFe or work at all
  • Oct 28-29 – attended/spoke at/helped run an agile conference. Further distanced myself from class with more information on the topic of agile that wasn’t safe.
  • Oct 30 – went to NYC Scrum user group. Awesome talk but again more info on the topic of agile that wasn’t safe. Took first practice test when I got home (and was tired.). Got at 80%. Good enough. it’s a pass.
  • Oct 31 – re-read PDF from class and then took real exam in between trick or treaters. Tired and distracted but glad to be done. Pass!

In class they advised us to practice until getting a 90% on the pracitce exam. I did not follow this advice. It’s only $50 for a retake so better to try the real one and see what happened rather than

I didn’t want to leave this for the weekend because I want to spend a bunch of time working on my upcoming book so need to be thinking about Java. Also, you have to take it within 30 days and I’m not going to find myself with more time if I wait.

The exam

All questions were single answer multiple choice with four possible answers. All of them were relatively short which was a pleasure after my experience with the Java 21 exam!

Some were very easy. Some had two reasonable sounding answers. For a number of them you had to know how SAFe would handle the scenario even if that’s not how another agile framework would.

Logistics

The exam is non proctored and you don’t have to show your environment on camera. It was nice not to have to clean up all the programming books and papers around me. The environment is exactly the same as the practice tests one.

After the exam

You get a score report with the % right for each category. This part looks like the report for the practice exam. Unlike the practice exam, you don’t see the questions and which ones you got wrong specifically.

Timing

As I mentioned in my experience with the Java 21 exam blog, I typically finish exams with lots of time to spare. This was a 90 minute exam. I finished my first pass in 34 minutes and my second (to clean up the ones I was unsure of) in 20. really a little less sinceI got up for trick or treaters a few times.

PASSED! Jeanne’s Experience Taking the Java 21 Certification Exam 1Z0-830

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Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 21 Developer

As we mentioned recently, Oracle announced their new Java 21 Certification Exam 1Z0-830 this week. Scott passed first and wrote about his experience. Now I join the first few Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 21 Developer’s in the world.

Unlike Scott, who passed on the first attempt, it took me two tries. See my blog post from last week for why. Anyway, this time I passed with a 74%. I still had time pressure with only 10 minutes to review answers. (To be fair, it’s 9 days later; not enough time for Oracle to do anything with our feedback about length)

As we mentioned earlier last week, Oracle announced their new Java 21 Certification Exam 1Z0-830 this week. Scott passed on Friday and wrote about his experience. Today was my turn.

Changing my exam date

You have to wait five days to retake an exam. That would have been Saturday. however the exam is not offered on the weekend. So I registered for Monday. I then learned I needed to go into the office on Monday so got to learn how to reschedule the exam. It was very easy.l The exam registration email from Oracle has a link to reschedule. After that the form looks the same as booking originally where you choose a day and then a time. The Tuesday 7am slot wasn’t available by the time I knew Monday was no good so I switched to Wednesday at 7am.

Checking in

The blog post from last week . The proctor did not want to see my paper was blank. (While you don’t see the proctor’s name, zoom said it was proctor 8. Which is the same number as last time. So it might have been the same person.

The exam

Like last time, I had some very long questions. While a lot had a good amount of code to read, there were five where I had to scroll a ton. Those questions take a lot of time. I used the same techniques as last time with two extras:

  • I used my cursor as a pointer as I was reading code. This got me to be more careful reading so I didn’t miss things.
  • Thought in my head as if I was explaining to someone why I was ruling out choices. Again to force myself to be more careful.

Some of the questions on the exam were the same ones I got last week. Many were different. While I was somewhat faster on ones I’d seen before, I deliberately slowed myself down. My problem last week was silly mistakes not lack of knowledge. So I had to make a point of being more careful.

In terms of time, I had 16 minutes left with one skipped question. (There was one with a lot of reading near the end and I figured I’d feel less rushed if I did it last. I spent 6 minutes on that questions. I then spent 5 minutes checking a few. I still didn’t get to check the majority of questions I marked for careful review. Submitted with 5 minutes left.

We let Oracle know about the exam length problem so hopefully they do something to improve the situation.

For content, I got a lot of pattern matching and records. I didn’t get virtual threads or sequenced collections this time (I did last week) so definitely luck of the draw.

After the exam

I removed the Lockdown browser software from my machine. It has a lot of power so I like it not being there.

I also went to the CertView page to get my badge. I used Chrome as Safari on Mac didn’t let me expand the menus.

To see my exam details:

  • Expand “Exam Results” on left navigation
  • Click “Exam History” on left navigation
  • Click “Results” on this exam on the right side
  • This downloads a PDF showing which objectives you got a question wrong on

For credentials, expand “Credential Management” on left navigation. You can then download a certificate or badge. There are also links to post on Linked In or email a link to verify your credential. I then went on Linked in and added a credential including the credential URL.