Java Compentancy Tests

After working at my previous employment for six years, I decided that I wanted a change. I contacted a couple of recruiters and thus began a 2-week adventure that led me to my current position.

Since I was applying for a mid-level position and not a junior position, I had to take a few tests through a separate company that verified that I actually knew a little bit about Java. :-)

Some of the hoops I had to jump through included taking about 6(!) online Java tests. I was quite surprised to find that many of these tests were weighted heavily towards testing one's knowledge of language syntax. For instance, a typical question could be worded like the following example (NOTE: This was *NOT* actually one of the questions, but some of the questions did follow this "style"):

   How do I print the word "andrew" to the console?

   A. System.out.printline("andrew");
   C. System.out.printLine("andrew");
   C. System.out.println("andrew");
   D. System.out.printLn("andrew");

Is it really that important to test one's knowledge of Java method names? I had to really think about some of the questions as I usually use my IDE's auto-populate features to fill in method names as I need them....

Also, some of the tests already seemed dated. I'm quite familiar with EJB 3.X syntax and semantics, but (thankfully) I missed the EJB 1.X and 2.X days so I struggled my way through many of the archaic EJB questions. Fortunately, EJB 3.X uses some of the same concepts as in EJB 1.X and 2.X so I was able to muddle through some of the questions.

Another annoyance I found was getting quizzed on things like JSP implicit objects when I've spent the past two years avoiding scriptlets in my JSPs! That kind of threw me as I have tried to restrict myself to JSTL & OGNL to retrieve values. By the way, there are 8(!) implicit objects. Off the top of my head I could only think of four of them. :-)

Anywho, I do not fault the test authors for the outdated questions. Java is a constantly changing ecosystem and trying to gauge one's knowledge of the Java platform is like trying to hit a moving target!