Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 577 posts

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

#111

Post by pwthornton »

xienyc wrote: post #101
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…

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format.

Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format.

Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails.

The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work.

This is a failure. An abysmal failure.

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

#112

Post by generationP »

_bxg1 wrote: post #79
generationP wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing HEIC support (and Apple support in general) is not an issue of quality; it's an issue of "knowing your customers". I doubt there could be any certification body for that.

It suggests that they didn't even bother to try the app on an iPhone, which is what probably half of their target users reach for when they need to take photos. That belies a significant degree of laziness and/or incompetence.

There is no "app". There's a website, from what I understand. Not everything needs to be tested on mobile. In their place I'd have left an option to upload non-supported formats "just in case" to leave a trail, without guarantee of acceptance; but this is not something I'd have expected them to do.

I'm also wondering how many iPhone users have that .heic setting at its default value, as opposed to having switched to .jpg.

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

#113

Post by athenot »

_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…

> We need some sort of standard for software engineering quality.

I contend we need defined SLAs because ultimately that's what matters.

Create the software in Visual Basic or Rust, I don't care. But it needs to work. Define SLAs with consequenses and the rest will sort itself out.

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

#115

Post by supernova87a »

I think this year is going to have to be written off in terms of secondary education.

These AP tests, which are already probably one of the few objective competence-based exams, are going to be not trustworthy given all these issues. While probably not being grossly cheated on under this new format by huge numbers of students, it just is not believable that they're producing results fairly comparable with controlled testing environments.

Add to that the asinine notion to move everyone to Pass/Fail (or even "all-As", ala Berkeley) out of equity reasons, and this year is just an exercise in social promotion -- it's for sure not an exercise in effective education. I'm sure this will just add to the calls to toss out all tests (SAT, ACT, AP, etc), and just move to having your own teachers assess you on whether you're ready for college (no unintended consequences there, I'm sure!).

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

#116

Post by wlesieutre »

crazygringo wrote: post #4

I thought iOS was supposed to convert HEIC images to JPEG automatically behind-the-scenes in any file transfer situation where HEIC isn't supported. The article itself even says: > iPhones convert HEICs to JPEGs automatically when they’re attached to emails in the Mail app I'm just curious technically why the same didn't happen with the testing portal? If you have a webpage that accepts image uploads, is iOS Safari n…

The article reads to me like the people who had problems sent the images from the phone to their computer, which may not trigger the automatic conversion? One air dropped it to the computer and renamed it PNG, another renamed it JPEG, but they were probably HEIC files with the wrong file extension.

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

#117

Post by kortilla »

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.

People who grew up with cars still frequently can’t change oil or change flat tires.

A huge chunk of people will always do the minimum for basic usage and never dig deeper.

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

#118

Post by MattGaiser »

xienyc wrote: post #101
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…

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…

> even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before

This problem seems like it could easily have been fixed in under a week.

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

#119

Post by pwthornton »

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.

Not being able to accept common image formats is a failure of the programmers, not Apple, which is looking to use more modern image formats that have better compression and quality.

It really bothers me when programmers make excuses for laziness or shoddy work that results in user's being harmed. Start caring about your users.

The iPhone is the most popular phone model in the United States. This is on the College Board. It takes very little work to make this work properly, which ANY BASIC QA PROCESS WOULD HAVE CAUGHT.

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

#120

Post by mywittyname »

I think this is on Apple more than anyone. They have the attitude that it's okay to break long-standing traditions for the sake of pushing society into the future. Apple users seem to be a-okay with this attitude, so I'm not surprised that it has eventually come to kick users in the ass.

The three years or so that they've been using the format by default is not enough time to catch up. I know this is the first I've heard of HEIC, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Apple should default to sending a jpeg in situations where it cannot confirm support of newer formats. Maybe this means jpegs remain the default interchange format indefinitely, but so what? They are Good Enough for most cases.

Post reply on HN