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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

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Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#91

Post by oefrha »

dragontamer wrote: post #81
oefrha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to JPEG. Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Edit: Like a sibling comment said, the accept attribute actually isn't necessary; even PNG images (e.g. screenshots) from Photos are converted to JPEG automatically.…

> Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC was not specified? HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should default to JPEG in this case.

1. input type=file can be used to upload any file format (or any non-format, for that matter). If you want specific file formats, you make your intention clear.

2. Please try to read the entire comment. iOS does default to JPEG when uploading, the accept attribute isn't needed.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#92

Post by dtech »

coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

The articles seems to indicate that the upload crashed, so they probably don't have the files

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#93

Post by cm2187 »

Hokusai wrote: post #77

> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs. This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depe…

Plus the backend doesn't move fast. The .net framework only got a json serializer recently. I am not holding my breath for system.drawing to handle HEIC!

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#94

Post by vosper »

cm2187 wrote: post #84

What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone in their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it. It is a problematic form of computer illiteracy.

> What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone in their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it

Why shouldn't that work? I think it would be pretty great if changing the file extension popped up a helper that asked me if I wanted to convert from HEIC to JPG?

Really, no-one should have to think about file formats when they're trying to do something that has nothing intrinsically to do with file formats.

Seems more like a failure of software engineering, to me.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#95

Post by chapium »

coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

This is college board we are talking about. I guess parents will just have to pay for another exam and hope its graded fairly.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#96

Post by majormajor »

jacques_chester wrote: post #68
_bxg1 wrote: post #3

This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) h…

> If not governmental, maybe an organization around this could be made by developers themselves. These exist. The ACM and IEEE CS are best-known, but there are also various national bodies (ACS in Australia, BCS in the UK etc). > Not the "certified for $technology" certifications we have now, but a certification of fundamental software engineering skills and principles. The IEEE Computer Society has such a thing, mai…

> But one thing other professions have that we lack is (1) fairly worked-out fundamental theoretical bases, or at least long experience to draw on, and (2) legal enforcement of standards.

A world with (2) without (1) would be pretty miserable.

Trying to do this today wouldn't be enforcement of standards, it would be "pray you got it right."

We could build standards for building more-robust software, but every piece of software would become vastly more expensive. We would need massive improvements in tools to avoid that.

And then there's the whole security angle... Is it a failing to have your software be impervious to attackers? To what degree? You wouldn't expect most bridges to withstand a determined attacker...

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#98

Post by snazz »

machello13 wrote: post #65
snazz wrote: post #32

Here's the relevant frontend source code for the file upload picker, if anyone's wondering (webpack://src/components/exam/submissions/FileInput.js): { const [file] = Object.keys(e.target.files).map(key => e.target.files[key]) const fileSizeInMb = file.size/(CONVERSION_BASE*CONVERSION_BASE) const fileSizeInKb = file.size/CONVERSION_BASE const split = file.name.split('.') const fileType = split[split.length-1].toLowerC…

So do we know yet why iOS wasn't auto-converting the HEIC images? Is it because they didn't use mime types in the `accept` attribute?

That's my guess, looking at how they made the accept attribute.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#99

Post by save_ferris »

dtech wrote: post #92
coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

The articles seems to indicate that the upload crashed, so they probably don't have the files

Which is why GP proposed giving students the opportunity to email the files separately.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#100

Post by nmstoker »

ReverseCold wrote: post #87
nmstoker wrote: post #74

Clearly needs to be solved and fast, and I have huge sympathy for those affected. However to me the more interesting point is why anyone would want to submit a handwritten script when they could type it. Not to sound like an old foggey, but in my day the only people who got to type were dyslexic and it gave them a huge advantage (no doubt why so many parents were having their children tested). Even if you could write…

Some tests require symbols (like greek letters), which aren’t easy to type by default. Also, people have been practicing all year by handwriting responses (since we didn’t know it would be online, obviously) - so a handwritten option is accommodating that.

I see, so typing entries is purely a Covid-19 reaction? Sorry, hadn't appreciated that earlier.

Definitely feels like something to keep after things go back to closer to how they were.

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