Because converting more than 1 letter to upper case is more computationally expensive than converting 1 letter to upper case.

how so? /genq

according to my introduction to logic (or was it structired programming? cant remember) class, doing that is considered "defensive programming" and isn't a good practice.
to clarify, i think they mean doing checks like that when they arent needed. if the excercise says the input will always be a valid string, then you shouldnt do a check for that

Great

Not sure what you're trying to say. But this solution is wasteful.

strings are immutable, there's no differece converting the whole name or fisrt char if youre not reassociating.

Do we not need curly brackets for if statements?

Does this only work because the else statement is that final thing running?
looking at it (or the lack there of) is making my skin crawl!

LOL there's a .startsWith() function??

Please use spoiler flag next time.

Although I can understand the function but it is not my choice.
It confused me.

Its allways better to check like
if(name == null) throw new IllegalArgumentException("name must not be null");
even if the description says that only valid strings appear

Names given are always valid strings.

name is an object, so I think checking for null should be done.

Very bad data structure. That "kind" of how the data is given is the actual struggle in this exercise.