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

Sure but they're expressly not a $1 billion/year software company. They are a pen-and-paper company that because of the pandemic had to build something quickly with little institutional experience.

Turns out I overlooked some details in the article. Some students (after the issue was known) airdropped photos to their computers and attempted to rename .heic to .png/.jpeg to bypass the extension check (who would have guessed extensions don't have to correspond to file types), they went through but were rejected a day later. The article isn't clear on what exactly was happening before, but I suppose students were trying to submit airdropped .heic directly?

In any case, sounds like absolutely horrid QA and communications of what's accepted (and of course, very bad idea not supporting the format in the first place when half your test takers are taking pictures in that format).

(A bit more context on my original comment: I thought they had some working system where test takers could upload photos directly from their phones — e.g., scan a QR code to open a page with a unique ID with an image upload form. Turns out that's too much to ask; their process is "get the image from your camera to your test-taking device whichever way you can think of, not our problem." Not surprisingly that's not a very foolproof process.)

> I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much more complicated than eyeroll suggests.

Wife's a middle school teacher and ~40-50% of the other people in my social circle (not via her & her colleagues, oddly enough) are teachers, too. What they've done here (this state, post NCLB) is get rid of comprehensive curriculums with prepared material (workbooks, sheet packets, textbooks) and now districts and teachers all come up with this stuff themselves, which is clearly wasteful—why have a committee at the state-level do this once when every goddamn district can hire a couple new people to handle curriculum and rope teachers into those same committees, because they don't already have so many friggin' meetings they're starting to overlap?—so yes, hard eyeroll at the trend away from textbook + workbook as a foundation for (middle grade and lower, at least) classes. The state could have made their own such resources several times over for the waste the current system has produced, if they didn't trust a company to provide it (as was usually the case in the past). The whiplash-inducing pointless policy shifts in education, usually implemented by what sure appear to be given their observed behavior certifiable morons, is tiresome and harmful to educators and families alike (we have both perspectives).

Now there are CDC suggestions that kids should have their own resources next year, but gee, we just switched away from textbooks + workbooks, which would have been great, to a mess of shared "learning centers" and junk like that (oh and got rid of all the indoor-recess toys in the kindergarten classrooms statewide to make room for those). It's pure fad-chasing, well-intentioned at best and the school admin version of résumé-driven-development at worst (and it's often the latter). When they accidentally stumble on an idea that might be good they fail to implement it correctly (i.e. they can't even follow simple directions or understand how games or human systems work, these highly-paid jokes of PhDs that run the schools). Very frustrating.

Maybe your schools are doing a better job than ours but there's no possible way the tech support load & assignment screw-up rate here isn't a bigger hassle here than if it were on regular ol' paper, including the effort of shuffling that around and disinfecting it, and I think they've actually done a decent job given the tools they're being told to use (webshit and apps) and the time they had to prepare. Hell they could probably buy some kind of UV disinfectant chamber for submitted papers for what they spend on all these stupid apps every year, stick a drop-box just inside the door of the meal-delivery schoolbuses and outside the school, and call it good.

What I know for sure: the only part of this where it felt like my kid was almost getting the kind of education they would in the classroom without a ton of extra effort on our parts, and it felt like we understood what they needed and what needed to be done about 100% of the time, was the first couple weeks when we did have organized packets of paper instructions and assignments they sent home before spring break just in case there were closures (they didn't yet know it'd be the whole rest of the school year, of course). And with the paper we didn't have to deal with "this login isn't working" and "I hit the wrong thing and now my work I just did is gone" and "what the fuck, I, the adult and a software professional, can't even find this thing they say is at the other end of this link (or where in the app this thing is supposed to be, or whatever)", and so on, and so on.

That's for the younger kids. For the older ones, drop-off rates have been... high. Many of those kids weren't even attempting the majority of assigned work, if they were doing any of it, by a week or two into this. Very high levels of effort by some teachers had noticeable but still low effects on keeping kids engaged. We're talking north of half the kids in my wife's school essentially just skipping 4th quarter this year, and a good chunk of the rest getting maybe 10% as much out of it as they would have in school—it's that bad. I think some assignments missed due to logistics or scanning errors or whatever are nothing next to those effects.

If they didn't have to retake the test they would have 0 stress because they'd be done, so you can't really claim there's less stress. Also many students likely already crammed enough knowledge into their heads for when they took the original test, and are now forced to retain all of this for multiple weeks, i.e they have to put in a lot more effort studying for little to no improvement in score (yes students cram for tests and don't retain information, that's just how testing works)

> why wouldn't changing the extension trigger the OS to convert the file?

If you change the extension on any operating system and then open it in the image viewer, it does appear to work. It doesn't as image viewers do not trust the file extension and ignore it, but there is no indication of that to the average user.