201–210 of 577 posts
The thing I don't understand in all the news articles I have read about this is the major complaint of the students seems to be that they have to retake the test which will mean they have to study for a few more weeks. Isn't having more time to study a good thing? Having more time to study and prepare should mean less stress, not more.
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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…
I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.
Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.
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So you build a service that doesn’t properly validate or gracefully handle invalid file types and it’s my fault as the end user when I try to upload something and the system fails? If you build a service that can’t support one of the most commonly used platforms in the world, that’s on you the developer, not me the user. This is software engineering 101 right here, and was completely avoidable on the part of the deve…
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And knowing that these big companies do stupid stuff around standards is part of building software. This isn't any different from the browser wars. It's completely unrealistic to expect developers to not have to deal with these kinds of issues.
I think the anger around Apple's hostility towards standards is valid, but completely out of scope for this kind of issue.
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While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization." Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the…
HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come. When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.
Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet).
And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwards compatible experience, they've been dragging their feet for YEARS on Safari support for progressive web app features that would let devs build truly feature-comparable web apps without being beholden to the App Store walled garden.
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Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. It's honestly one of the biggest conundrums facing academia. Year by year, incoming students generally have a higher base level of digital literacy than their instructors, because academic institutions did not prioritize developing those skills 10-20 years ago a…
> Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. Many people who are very knowledgable in technology (the SV bubble is rather an exception) are very conservative in terms of it. Don't confuse good programmers with "technology hipsters".
My background includes software dev in and around online education for almost 20y in both industry and academic.
Totally outside bubbles and following groupthink :)
The conservatism from technologists that you speak of.. in part comes from the politics at post secondaries and the resistance towards adopting technology.
There's no shortage of understanding in most institutions of the problems and how to solve them, only the political will, and leadership who cares.
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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 doubt things are much better today. This was probably the "low-tech" solution to a decade+ of dealing with the above problem.
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 b…
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Apparently somebody claims to have been able to change the extension and submit the picture, but got "file corrupted" later: "Senior Dave Spencer took a demo test before his Calculus AB exam to make sure he understood the process for uploading photos. He Airdropped an iPhone image of his responses to his Mac and tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG. Changing a file’s extension does not guarantee that…
Anyone who says that young people are better with computers these days needs to keep this paragraph on file. I can’t really blame the college board for this kind of mistake. Like would he assume that taking a .docx and renaming it to .pdf converts it?