Sadly, I scored just 81, though I disagree with some of his answers. He tried splitting hairs and wound up making true statements that he intended to be false. I won't say which in order to not spoil it for others.

no2pencil, on 25 September 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

Bad advice.

When I used to teach programming, if a student came to me complaining that someone in their group wasn't working out, I would ask them if they had talked to the person about it. If they had not or were unwilling to then I talked to the person(s) in question and asked for a report from each person in the group to be turned in with the assignment. I had a form to use (and sometimes asked for this from everyone even if they didn't have a complaint), but the point is that I would assign the final grade only after taking these reports into account. If one person didn't pull their share of the load then they didn't get much credit for the work. My students seemed satisfied with this solution.

One thing I did not tolerate, however, was somebody simply doing the work on their own without consulting me first. That received little to no credit, even if it was well done. The reason: most of my assignments were individual work, so when I assigned a team, part of what I was looking for was how well people could work in a team. If a person simply struck out on their own then that showed a lack of cooperation/teamwork.

Skydiver, on 12 September 2012 - 06:02 PM, said:

The school in question is clearly a community college (aka a junior college). These colleges offer two-year degrees and are not allowed to turn anyone down based on academics (other than requiring a high school diploma or GED). This explains why so many people at these schools have to take developmental (below 100-level) classes.

I taught at a community college at the time when our state first started offering AAS degrees and was in on the development of the degree. This is not intended to be an employable degree--the entire point of an AAS is that it gets you the first few classes needed for a BS in Computer Science. If the community college has a valid articulation agreement with the university the student transfers to then they can probably complete the degree in a total of four years. Before the adoption if the AAS, it would typically take five years simply because of the sequence in which courses needed to be taken. This is not a reasonable program to expect to lead directly to employment, so is not really the type under discussion here.

About that article--keep in mind that it was written 6 years ago and by someone who clearly has never actually been in academia or taken one of these supposedly "dumbed down" Java classes. I taught Java before I became a software engineer and my students learned recursion or failed. They had a basic idea of pointers; granted, you can't do pointer arithmetic and you don't get seg fault errors in Java, but you can get the basic idea in a one term intro course.

Those who took my data structures course (also taught in Java) learned all about pointers without ever dealing with seg faults. The man was on a rant and was so caught up in ad hominem attacks based on little to no actual evidence outside of a few idiots he'd observed that nothing he says in that article can be taken seriously, I'm afraid.

As for learning Java first, I say that's great. Any language will serve as a good first language as long as you also dig in further at some point and learn how things work behind the scenes. If all you ever know is the programming language (C included, in spite of that ranting article's underlying assumptions) then you will never be a great software designer.

Actually, since there are multiple return statements and no conditionals, nothing after the first return statement will ever get executed--the compiler will probably complain about that, too.

You can only return once from a method; once it hits a return statement, the method is done and nothing below that will get executed.

Can you provide an example of what you're trying to get from that method? That might help us help you figure out what to do.