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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.

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

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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.

Before the exam

I registered on Friday night to take the exam on Monday morning. As Scott noted, the registration process has changed a lot and we will be posting blogs about that. I chose the 7am slot so I wouldn’t have to miss much work time. Starting Sunday at 8am, I got a reminder every 3 hours. Yes, that’s 8 reminder emails. Seems excessive, but I was definitely reminded

I cleaned up to unplug my second monitor and have my workspace free of books and papers. (Which oddly the proctors didn’t check for). I took out my two forms of id. I even left myself a post it reminding to use Chrome and not Safari. And I made sure to get up with enough time to have breakfast and get dressed by 6:30am. Checkin starts half an hour before the exam slot.

Checking in

I did the Lockdown Browser test the day before. I had to do it again right before the exam (just the test, not the practicing with the UI). Sign in was quick. There’s an embedded Zoom meeting with everyone in your slot. You raise your hand to be taken to a breakout where the proctor checks your id. I didn’t hold mine close enough to the camera so got a chat message to do so. Then I got the code for the exam. Which started the two hour timer right away.

I asked my proctor about showing my scratch paper was blank and the proctor didn’t want to see it (Scott’s proctor did). Also odd was that you could see the names and video of everyone in your group while in the main room. Once you moved to your exam tab, they were offscreen. Still seems like an odd security choice to have people on video without virtual background to strangers.

The exam

Like Scott I had some very long questions. A number had 15+ lines of code with 4-6 of those as options. And many were very similar which meant I had to waste time spotting the differences to figure out what I was being asked. Which is hard when they are next to each other and even harder when scrolling. And then actually answer the questions. There were still some multiple choice with 4-6 answers and some word problems with multiple choice answers.

Like Scott, I saw a lot of topics mixed together in a single question. I liked the questions as they got you to think about code. I didn’t like how much I had to scroll/remember at one time from the question. And that was with scrap paper. I used it for process of elimination and to keep track of variable state.

As for content:

  • Pattern matching switch was definitely on the exam (with and without records)
  • Scott didn’t get a question about Virtual threads or Sequenced Collections and noted it was likely just bad luck of the draw. I got questions about both. And they tested the core concepts of each topic, not just using them in passing. So definitely covered.
  • The topics removed from the objectives were not on the exam.
  • The questions I got covered the objectives well.

How I did

Normally, I when I take an exam, I finish answering all the questions between the halfway and two thirds point. At that point, I go through all the questions again with an emphasis of what I was unsure of and typically fix 3-7 stupid mistakes from misreading or things I didn’t notice. And then I wind up with a good amount of time left on the timer and end early.

That was not my experience. With 18 minutes left, I had six questions I hadn’t even looked at. I flagged anything long at that point without reading and got to the end with 10 minutes left. I then used the next six minutes to answer the three long ones I flagged from those six. That left me with 4 minutes left. I was afraid that the exam attempt wouldn’t go through if it hit zero so I ended it there. That means I didn’t have time to review my answers and fix the stupid mistakes I always make. That was reflected in my score – 62%. Which is 3 questions below passing. See blog post for when I passed a week later

I’m currently worried about the length of the exam. I’ve never come close to running out of time on an exam. I probably could have gone a tiny bit faster if I wasn’t thinking about the exam relates to our book. But I did that for all the other exams and it didn’t affect my time in any noticeable way. I’m hoping Oracle sees this and rebalances the exam to have less long questions.

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

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As we mentioned earlier this week, Oracle announced their new Java 21 Certification Exam 1Z0-830 this week. Being a gluten for punishment, I signed up as soon as it was available to take (Thursday). I passed! But with a much tighter margin than I expected. Read on for more details.

What can I say about the exam? Well, first signing up and taking the exam is a completely different process. It’s all remote now! We will be posting a series of articles covering the steps to take the exam (and there are many!). So I’ll leave off those details for now.

The 1Z0-830 exam itself is very different from past exams. The first hint was they raised the exam time from 90 to 120 minutes. And I can see why! The questions (and answers) on the exam are quite long. While there was a handful of singe-page questions, the vast majority required scrolling multiple pages. This was compounded by the fact for some questions, each multiple choice option contained 20-30 lines of code with 6-10 options available. Process of elimination can be a slow process if you’ve got to eliminate 9 out of 10 answers!

I don’t know about you, but reading over a hundred lines of code for a single question is really time consuming! I ended up finishing with only 5 minutes to spare.

There’s no other way to put it, but the exam was difficult. While I think all of the questions were in scope (and covered in our new Java 21 1Z0-830 book coming out later this year!), I’ve never seen so many topics mixed into a single question. As an example (not real!), a question might have a 15-line code sample and then asked you to select 2 out of 6 interface declarations (~20-lines each) that will make the code print “Hello World”.

If you expected the options to all be similar, you’d be wrong!

Some of the options were vastly different than others, testing all sorts of things. As a further example (again, this isn’t a real question), one interface might be wrong because it includes a private instance variable, while another might be incorrect because of some inheritance issue. Furthermore, another might be wrong because it includes a pattern matching switch statement that is missing a default clause.

TLDR: Oftentimes, each question covered topics across multiple objectives.

There were the occasional question that limited its breath to a single objective, but I found that to be the exception, not the rule.

As for content, I can’t give too much away but I will say this:

  • [New Java 21 Feature] Pattern matching switch was definitely on the exam (with and without records)
  • [New Java 21 Feature] I didn’t get a question about Virtual threads or Sequenced Collections, but that’s likely just bad luck of the draw.
  • Previous exam topics like JDBC/Annotation/Security were not on the exam (reflected in the objectives).
  • Logger.getLogger() appeared on the exam but don’t panic. You don’t need to know anything beyond it, other than it being an alternative to System.out.println().
  • Records were definitely on the exam. Like. A lot.
  • Streams, while certainly still on the exam, weren’t as challenging or centrally focused as they had been on previous exams. In fact, when I saw a stream question, I was excited because they tended to be shorter and easier to read (direct opposite of my previous exam experience!).
  • Modules were on the exam. I actually thought the module questions were fairer and more self-contained than other questions, in part because you can’t easily mix modules with other topics like pattern matching or threading.

When taking the exam, you absolutely need to pace yourself! If you get a question that’s just too long, you should definitely skip and come back later. Unfortunately for me, at least half of the questions were quite long to read. Another tip is to study the options carefully (which is really hard to do in a short time and given the 20-30 line length of each option) to try to spot differences. For example, if you can spot that 4 out of 8 questions use a bad modifier or return type, you can answer it much more reliably. Unfortunately, many of the questions bordered on being eye exams. While I could have easily spotted a private modifier in the wrong place on a short code sample, add multiple layers of inheritance and dozens of lines of code, and it blended in surprisingly well. The questions were fair, but quite difficult.

Oh, and scrap paper. You need scrap paper. There is no in-app whiteboard (like they did in the past for some exams). Since it’s proctored remotely, I asked my proctor before I started I could use blank sheets of paper. I held the sheets up to the camera one at a time, and they approved. I don’t know if Oracle has a policy, so it might be proctor specific. Scrap paper was critical in part because if you have to pick from 2 out of 10 options, you need to some way to track what you’ve eliminated (the right-click to cross out feature has been off the exam for years now). There were also a number of questions that involved doing math (order of operation, nested for() loops with lots of variables, etc) that tracking variable states was hard.

On the plus side, my results were available immediately on the screen as soon as I submitted the exam, and the certificate was posted to my Certview within the hour.

We’ll have more details after Jeanne takes the exam, so stayed tuned!