Last weekend, I appeared for the SCWCD exam. Before you guys start making any guesses let me make the air clear, I had to appear, I didn’t wanted to. Last year I had bought a coupon for the exam on heavy discount. With the baniya mentality, I had thought of selling it to some one else making a premium over it. But guess what, I ran out of luck. Part due to my laziness, part due to my luck, I didn’t find any buyer. And the 31st March deadline lay approaching. I had no other option but to appear myself, lest suffer a loss of a few grands.

Now choice of exam center. I started calling each and every mentioned Prometric center to book a date. But, the way we Indians tend to leverage advantage over others limited options, is what I stood in front of. Every center was ready to give a date, but as soon as I told them that coupon was expiring on 31st Mar, they declined. A few offered me the weekday slot. I wanted weekend so as not to fail ;)

It seemed I was to loose money, which was my biggest worry. My MOM was after me reiterating that this was to happen when you do things at the 11th hour. Well with a lot of luck wishes from my friends, I finally managed to find a center and book a slot. This time I played smart, I didn’t mention about the expiry date. :)

A week before the exam I pondered over the syllabus and was surprised to find that I didn’t knew 80% of the stuff. Why? Because that was all theoretical things we tend to forget over time. A crash revision course was needed. To add more to my suffering it was UAT and release time, shit, which gave me little time to study. With the advent of IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments) and Intellisense, a lot is taken off developer’s shoulders. This makes them more vulnerable to these certification exams.

A free mock exam website came to help. The website contains many links to free Java certification exams. The only thing I could do was start giving them. What is best with these exams is you can submit the whole exam at the very first question, and then browsing answers for review ;) A trick that saved me a lot of time and generated my reading material. I somehow managed to study 50% of the questions provided, and indeed, it proved really helpful.

The day arrived. I just wanted to save my money. I prayed to the almighty to help me keep up to my reputation of being a baniya. Two hours and I was through the test and a round of revision too. I was sure that I would pass and not flunk. God blessed me and I really did pass. Alas! the exam time was over!

Paise bach gaye!

I feel the test question required more of mugging than application. Under the agreement I cannot reveal the questions per se, but what I can advise others is that leave the IDE for a month and code everything by hand, specially the deployment descriptor and other config files. The deployment descriptor structure is something that can make you look like a first-grade student even with several years of development experience. And yes, going through the mock-exams, will surely add to your success and save you lots of time ;)

If you need any help on the certification, feel free to reach me.

Hope this helps and Best of luck to all aspirants.