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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

#131

Post by mrlala »

pwthornton wrote: post #111
xienyc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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…

Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.

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

#132

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

It gives the appearance of working on Windows. If you change the file extension of a picture, you can still open it, so it may come from that experience.

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by vaidhy »

I do not understand this huge criticism against college board for this. My daughter took 5 AP exams this time and we got multiple remainders from her teachers and AP board that HEIC will not work.

Here is the relevant FAQ: Can student submit an HEIC file of a photo of their handwritten work? Recent iPhones and iPads save photos as HEIC files. HEIC photo files can’t be submitted “as is” in the online exam. They must be converted to an accepted file format. Here are two ways students can do that: Update their Apple device settings before the exam so that their photos will be saved as .jpeg files: Settings > Camera > Formats > Select “Most Compatible” OR Resave the HEIC file as an accepted file format: the easiest way to convert an HEIC file is for students to email it to themselves using the iPhone or iPad Mail app. The attached image will automatically be converted to a JPEG.

I guess we think it is too hard for an AP student to actually read and follow instructions.

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

#135

Post by matsemann »

IvanK_net wrote: post #71

I am 100% on the side of the school. Unlike with JPEG, everybody who wants to work with HEIC should pay licence fees. Also, HEIC is like 50x more complex than JPEG. I hope the world will never get to a point, where each phone brand stores photos in their own format, and you need a special software from the phone manufacturer to view the photos (that is what we have now with raw photography formats, and what we used t…

I've never even heard of HEIC before, I'd probably make the same mistake.

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

#136

Post by markkanof »

mywittyname wrote: post #120

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 h…

Agreed. My company builds text messaging tools and we recently had to add support for HEIC images. Not a huge deal, but we only had to do it at all because we started seeing a few errors with users messages where a HEIC image was being sent in from an iPhone and we didn't have support for that format. It turns out that iOS will send a JPEG when sending an MMS message to avoid this compatibility issue. Except, in the cases where iOS doesn't send the JPEG and instead sends the HEIC. I'm not entirely sure what causes this but it seems to happen occasionally.

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

#138

Post by scott_s »

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.

Check the actual source code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261598

I don't think the failure is with the accept type. I think the failure is with the bespoke JavaScript checking the filenames. That puts the failure on the College Board, not Apple.

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

#139

Post by genocidicbunny »

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…

These tests take a not insignificant amount of time and stress to do, especially on top of this SiP situation. Not to mention they cost the students money.

Communicating these issues only over twitter is also not at all acceptable. Plenty of people don't use or rarely use twitter, such that it should not be considered the primary communication channel.

So while yes, College Board is allowing students to retake the tests, anyone affected should be refunded at least partially, if not fully, for having their time wasted. College Board should have had their backend reject invalid formats, not just hang. The result of attempting to upload an invalid format image should have been a 'whoops, please use a different format', but that's not what happened.

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

#140

Post by oefrha »

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…

> letting students take the test again.

Yeah, that still fits "our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry".

They have the submissions, the submissions can be easily converted to their target format. That's what they should do instead of asking students to take the test again.

Or maybe they simply delete any accepted[1] submission that they deem corrupted, in which case I have nothing more to say.

[1] Quote:

> Spencer used the same process on the real exam and thought it went through, but he received an email the next day saying the files were corrupted and that he needed to retake the test.

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