Passed today on SCEA Part I

This morning I took the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect Part I Exam. I wasn’t very excited studying for this exam, but the exam itself was just fine.

What I liked the most about the test was that many questions presented different problems and requirements, and asked me to give the most suitable solution. Besides that, most of the design patterns questions were contextual. Based on a given problem, I had to decide which patterns could help in the design of a good solution for the problem. I liked the fact that these questions made me THINK much more than REMEMBER stuff. There were a few questions focused on specific pattern details, but fortunately they were only a small portion of the exam.

There are many EJB/JPA questions in the exam, but if you’re familiar with the technologies, you should have no problem with them. The questions were not tricky. If you know the main aspects of these technologies, you’ll be just fine.

There were several Web Services questions, actually more than I expected. I liked this, because such knowledge is very important for any enterprise architect, and I’m particularly interested in the subject. I have a reasonable experience with web services, and I thought the questions were not very demanding.

The exam objective that I thought was my weakest was security. I didn’t know much about the JVM Security prior to this exam, and now I’m still no expert, but I did learn a few things.

Overall, I thought this was a nice exam and definitely it was more pleasant than I expected. I had 120 minutes to do the exam, but it took me around 80 minutes to finish it. The SCJP and SCWCD exams were more tiresome than this one. When I finished the exam, I wasn’t sure if I had passed, but the same thing happened to me in the SCJP and SCWCD exams, and I did ok.

There are 64 questions in the exam, and the minimum score to pass is 57% (37 questions). I answered 49 questions correctly, which translated into a 76% score.

Now I must checkout the Part 2 Assignment, and design an application during a 1 year span. I definitely won’t touch anything this year, because I must chill out. I hope Part 2 gives me more pleasure than Part 1, and hopefully I’ll learn a few more things.

If anyone’s planning to take this exam and want to talk about it, feel free to contact me, and I’ll try to help.