I've come across this before I feel like and it was some cause for grief on this exercise. I passed it, but only by doing some workarounds on SimpleDateFormat. Long story short, it doesn't seem to matter what format I type into the SimpleDateFormat(String format) constructor it always produces this one on my machine: "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss Z yyyy" What in the heck? So I tested a bit of code outside of the exercise in a new project and it did the exact same thing? What the heck??!! I've played around with the extra Locale argument for the US and it makes no difference. Looking forward to figuring out what I'm doing wrong here...
public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
        System.out.println("Hello world!");
        SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormatTest = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy MM dd");
        Date newDate = new Date();
        newDate = simpleDateFormatTest.parse("1988 12 10");
        System.out.println(newDate);
    }
}