Table of contents for the Spring 3 certification series of posts:

1. Jeanne’s core spring 3 certification experiences (Background information)
2. About the test (includes Scope of the test and Spring 2.5 vs 3.0 exam)
3. What did I read and how were the resources I tried
4. My study plan
5. Skills guru mock exam
6. What I would recommend as a study plan

About the test

It really shouldn’t be necessary to put this in a blog post.  But the information is so scattered that it is.  Here’s what is known:

• 50 questions
• 90 minutes (it was 88 minutes when I took it, but it is possible they counted the two minutes I spent reading the rules about what can and can’t be shared.)
• passing score is 76%
• there is an official study guide
• there are no official mock exams

That’s it.  That is literally all the information I found about the Core Spring 3 certification.  There is also some information about the 2.5 exam linked from the JavaRanch Spring Certification FAQ page.

Scope of the test

As Dan said in his 2.5 writeup:

Although I am not allowed to comment on the specific questions I can comment on the topics. One of the frustrations that I and many others have, is that there is just no real decent way to simulate this exam from a trusted source like you would with a Sun certification. So you are quite in the dark when it comes to an effective preparation on what is a massive topic. So hopefully the following information might be useful to you.

Following that philosophy, here’s the distribution for Spring 3:

• Container and test (20)
• AOP (10)
• JDBC (3)
• Transactions (4)
• Web (2)
• REST (2)
• Remoting  (2)
• Security (2)
• JMS (2)
• JMX (2)

The total does come to 50 because the questions were ordered in the same way as on the study guide making it easy to remember.  It could vary of course – this is just what I got.

Types of questions

Each questions has four answer choices.  There were a few types of questions. I note this because one of the few things I thought I knew prior to the exam was that each question has only one correct answer.  This turned out to be incorrect.

• Select one answer
• Select X answers
• Select one or more answers (I don’t like this type where they don’t tell you how many are correct.)
• Select the one that is not correct (this is ok – this is like “select three”

Most of the questions were fairly high level with a few detailed ones.  It didn’t stray far from the course or study guide which was a pleasant surprise given what I heard about the 2.5 exam.

There was also a question that contained a spelling error.  I was disappointed to see this in a published test; it says something about the quality control process.  I imagine since the Spring 3 test is fairly new, this will get shaken out soon.

Overall impressions

Finally, I’d like to compare my impression of the exam before and after.  I wrote the following before taking the exam.

The funny thing is Gavin [2.5 notes creator] says he doesn’t know what is on the exam because he is a grandfathered candidate and didn’t take the class. Ironically, I did take the class and don’t know what’s on the exam.  The class manual is too easy and doesn’t cover edge cases so clearly isn’t sufficient.  And the skills guru mock exam covered things that weren’t in the Spring 3 objectives and not mentioned in the class.   I’m not sure if he overthought things, the Spring 2.5 exam was harder or I’m still not grasping what is on the exam.  I do note the actual stated 2.5 had more in them such as Hessian/Burlap.

Now that I’ve taken the exam, I can say that the few available materials on the web created a lot more worry about the exam than was necessary.  The course student guide *is* on the level of the exam.  And the mock exams are much harder and contain content that is out of scope.

Spring 2.5 vs 3.0 exam

The Spring 2.5 exam sounds like it was a lot harder than the Spring 3.0 exam.  This is unfortunate in some ways – it means the certification means less.  Of course, if you are a candidate for the 3.0 exam. it is a good thing.  I wonder if the “dumbing down” of the exam has anything to do with ending the grandfathering of candidates.  The 3.0 exam is more like a course review whereas the 2.5 one sounded more like a knowledge of Spring test.  And since one is required to take the class before taking the test, this is most of the studying required.

Previous page: Background Information

Next page: Readings and Resources

Table of contents for the Spring 3 certification series of posts:

1. Jeanne’s core spring 3 certification experiences (Background information)
2. About the test (includes Scope of the test and Spring 2.5 vs 3.0 exam)
3. What did I read and how were the resources I tried
4. My study plan
5. Skills guru mock exam
6. What I would recommend as a study plan

I tried some other exams that didn’t claim to be mocks. See the week by week section for those. Or for more details about the resources in this table.

I’ve also read some other Spring books in the past for older versions of Spring.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of “Spring in Action” exchange for writing a review of the book when it prints. I am also a volunteer administrator at BlackBeltFactory from when I was active in the early days. This means I have thousands of contribution points and didn’t have to think about the cost when taking exams.

Previous page: About the test

Next page: My study plan

Table of contents for the Spring 3 certification series of posts:

1. Jeanne’s core spring 3 certification experiences (Background information)
2. About the test (includes Scope of the test and Spring 2.5 vs 3.0 exam)
3. What did I read and how were the resources I tried
4. My study plan
5. Skills guru mock exam
6. What I would recommend as a study plan

Since SpringSource refuses to provide a mock exam or even a few questions, the Skills-Guru tests are the best simulation we have of the environment. As such, they warrant their own section. General notes:

• While you can retake the exam as many times as you want for free, you can only see the questions you got wrong after completing the test.
• The mock did correlate with with the amount of time I needed per question. So if you think 90 minutes isn’t much for 50 questions, this is a good way to get used to it. Similarly to the SCEA, I had all the time in the world.
• They don’t give you percentages by area. I copied all the questions to Word and sub-totaled myself. As tedious as this was, it was useful. Good to know the weaker areas although tedious to put this together. (I wish they gave it automatically.) A LOT of the questions I got wrong were not covered in the class or course materials. This implies the mock creator might not have seen the course materials. Regardless the mock contains many things not on the exam.

Number of questions in each category so you can figure out your subtotal percentages. Ones with stars are categories that don’t appear on the real exam at all.

I also wonder if the same person wrote both tests. The style was different, the difficulty was different, the category names were different and exam #2 had a lot more out of scope content. In any case, comparing the distribution to the real exam, you’ll notice some differences.

Exam 1:

• Container/Test (14)
• AOP (6)
• JDBC (3)
• Transactions (6)
• Web/MVC (8)
• Remoting (6)
• JMS (3)
• JMX (3)
• *SP-EL (1)

Exam 2:

• Container/Test (13)
• AOP (6)
• Database(6)
• Transactions(2)
• Web/MVC (5)
• Remoting (3)
• JMS (2)
• JMX (2)
• *XML(1)
• *Email (1)
• *EJB(1)
• *Resources(1)
• *Type Conversion(1)
• *Dynamic Languages(1)
• *SpEL(1)
• *JCA(1)
• *General(1)
• + 2 others that I failed to record

Previous page: My study plan

Next page: What I would recommend as a study plan