Planning under exam conditions

Planning under exam conditions. For a 15-point FRQ, five minutes of planning is the highest-yield investment:

1. Write the method signature with real types — no var-style vagueness.
2. List the states: what does the loop carry between iterations?
3. Mark the boundaries: first element, last element, empty, none match, all match.
4. Write the control skeleton in comments first:

// for each row:
//     compute row max and row total
//     if max > total - max: count++

5. Then fill the code. The skeleton catches structural mistakes (wrong loop order, missing reset) while they are still free to fix.

After coding, re-read the spec sentence by sentence and check each claim against your code. Most lost FRQ points are spec sentences that were true in the reader's head and absent from the code.