spring 3 certification – skills-guru exam review

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

5 thoughts on “spring 3 certification – skills-guru exam review

  1. Hi Jeanne
    Congrats on clearing the exam.
    Thanks for your feedback on Skill-Guru exams. Yes we do not have break up of exams as per sections. Although we have at each difficulty level. We will take this feedback for our future version.
    Since you have cleared the exam and are guru in this area, would you like to create a mock test at Skill-guru for the readers ?

  2. skillguru: No thanks. I created a mock exam at BlackBeltFactory and added a whole pile of questions there. I did that before taking the exam though. I’m not sure I could do it afterwards without giving away exam content (even subconsciously.)

  3. Pingback: jeanne’s core spring 3 certification experiences | Down Home Country Coding With Scott Selikoff and Jeanne Boyarsky

  4. Hi,
    I am David one of the creator of http://www.springmockexams.com.

    First of all, I want to thank you Jeanne for this post !

    Thanks also for sharing your experience with us, my preparation started just from this blog !

    We provide a free and a full solution to prepare your Spring Core Certification as well. If you are interested you can just head over:

    http://www.springmockexams.com

    The website is also packed with general information regarding the exam.

  5. Hello Jeanne, it is a long time that I don’t write to you..
    First of all: thanks to share with your community our posts.

    We want to update the community telling that we release a new website with other Spring Core Certification Questions at: https://www.certification-questions.com

    The exciting news is that we improved the questions, UI and now we also include Java 8 and Oracle 12c certification-questions.

    Thanks as usual, best luck!
    -David

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