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Oracle9i: New Features For Administrators Exam Tips

Part of the certification terms and conditions state that you must not reveal the content of any questions from the OCP exams. That said, I will give you some general points about the 9i beta upgrade exam.

Remember, the beta and production exams will differ slightly so don't count on my comments to to relect exactly the content of the production exam. In the beta exam you can enter comments on each question. The questions may be revised based on your comments and the performance of the questions in general. So here goes:

Unlike the 8i exam, there were no free typing questions, such as "fill in the missing word".
The exam made heavy use of the "pick the most correct answer" style of questions ie.
```
In the UK 99% of women have names begining with the letter 'Z'. Which of the following is a UK womans name?
      
A - Barbara
B - Helen
C - Sarah
D - Zelda (correct)
```
All names are correct, but in the context of the question the most correct is (D). This style of question was very hard in the beta exam due to bad question writing. Hopefully they will be more clear in the production exam.
The "pick 3 out of 5" and "pick 5 out of 8" style questions were used frequently. These are difficult because you nearly always know some of the answers, but often do not know all. Once again, the production exam may well have less of the "pick 5 out of 8" questions depending on the question performance. This style of question was by far the most common. Also, some of the beta questions did not have enough correct answers to pick. In these cases I picked a random answer to complete the question and filled in the comment section to say the question was impossible to answer correctly. I assume these bad questions will be filtered out.
There were very few straight forward multiple choice questions, like "pick 1 correct answer". Where these were present they were often of the "most correct" style.
There was comparatively few syntax questions. I've never seen the point of testing syntax, preferring to focus on concepts. This seemed like a bonus for me but those who are good at learning syntax parrot-fashion may miss the easy points.
When syntax was tested, it invariably involved knowledge of both explicit syntax and default actions of commands. The questions would often have two correct answers, one using the explicit syntax and one which relied on the default action of the command. For these I took the view that I would always use the default action, not the explicit sytax. I was assuming that they were testing how well you knew the syntax. I might have guessed wrong so don't follow blindly if you feel different.

I think that is about it. Sorry I can't give any questions out but I don't want to lose my OCP status. I'm not sure they would actually do this, but I've not recieved my certificate yet so I'm not going to risk it.

Hope this helps. Regards Tim...

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