The issue is, when I throw an exception from the intProgress method, the tests don't have the exception in their signatures, so the exception is treated like an uncaught exception.

java.lang.AssertionError: Expected exception: java.lang.Exception

Its saying that during an assertion, the tests expected an exception from your code but did not recieve one.

In the prompt it tells you that any rank that isn't -8 through -1 or 1 through 8 should throw an exception

No, only one combination.

No, you don't, [2, 4, 1, 5] isn't sorted and the max value is at the end.

Your code only checks if the maximum value is at the first or last place in the array, which doesn't actually answer the question of wether the array is sorted or not.