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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

#311

Post by vehementi »

mturmon wrote: post #277
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…

> ... We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming. ... I see where you're going here, and I want to agree, but you aren't reckoning with the incentives for cheating on the AP. My kid is taking the "AP World" test today. One of her classmates was asked to sit by a different student to coach them at their computer during the test, because the test is done rem…

They would have a server log of who tried on time to submit it and had server errors. Those people could not have foreseen this... so we can accept their late submissions

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

#312

Post by karatestomp »

ativzzz wrote: post #288
karatestomp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on school-owned devices :-/ (but for something like school app/site passwords, though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine )

Sounds like the school owned device needs to come pre-installed with a password manager then, at least for school related activities. > though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine This works, until you have to bring the paper to school where your kids friends will inevitably find the paper and login and mess with their stuff (source: I was that friend)

Oh, yeah, paper should probably be stored with your liquor and only pulled out when needed (or with your guns if you're that sort, I guess). Otherwise siblings will pull some pranks.

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

#313

Post by simonh »

Alupis wrote: post #244
mrlala wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...

HEIC isn't simple, and isn't common. Apple should convert to JPG or PNG when exporting the image to anywhere anytime. The same problem happens with webp images too - totally unusable almost everywhere, even in photoshop. Apple wants to reduce storage space photos take up. Fine - but they should convert back to a standard format when exporting the image to be used on some other system. With that said, it seems the iss…

Nothing starts common, you have to start somewhere, and it is an ISO standard format.

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

#314

Post by KingMachiavelli »

tiglionabbit wrote: post #236
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…

Huh. So, according to the other comments, if they'd set the `accepts` on their form to MIME types instead of extensions, the browser would have converted the file to a JPG automatically.

Which means I think the blame is more on Apple side since the 'accept' attribute is intended to work with any 'Unique file type specifiers' [1] which includes both MIME types and extensions. Perhaps Apple is following a different RFC?

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

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

#315

Post by RandomGuyDTB »

jedberg wrote: post #271

The irony here is that it is the most privileged students who will suffer this the most. It's the ones with the fanciest phones that will run into this bug. Usually these things go the other way -- usually it's the poorest who have to deal with these kinds of things. Edit: See the reply below about iPhone SEs using HEIC. A point that I missed.

Don't get so ahead of yourself. Even people in relative poverty, in many cases, have new(er) iPhones, and HEIC is default on my SE, the budget iPhone model from 2016. In high schools you're alienated if you don't have the "blue bubbles"* - although it's stupid, if you're in high school in 2020 you probably need an iPhone, and you can get older models for a relatively small price (my SE was [1] - Source: I currently go to high school.

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

#316

Post by derefr »

btilly wrote: post #310
derefr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no format is specified, then the presumption would be that the website wants a raw octet stream, and that adulterating it would be the last thing a client device should do, because it knows nothing about what the website's going to do to the result.

Do you have any idea what that approach would do to bandwidth and latency?

Er... what?

By "raw octet stream", I meant that the client should upload a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD, as a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD; rather than assuming a higher-level intent on the server's part to acquire some abstract document, where the client would be able to better serve that request by transforming its file to a different file-format.

I didn't mean that e.g. the client should avoid using Transfer-Encoding compression during the HTTP POST request, or anything like that. (That is, after all, a fact about the wire representation of the request; it doesn't affect the file received on the server end.)

Or, to put that another way, an with no `accept`, is to the client, as `Cache-Control: no-transform` is to the server: an expressed desire to get some specific data that exists the other end sent over "as it is", rather than to get something customized to the peer's needs.

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

#317

Post by PascLeRasc »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #265
pwthornton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The parent comment said they sent a tweet a week before, and they had something in their faq but it doesn't say how long before that was done. Generally, when I've worked at places that were not startups a week to get something pushed in to fix something was not reliably enough time. I didn't see in the article anything about how long they have been aware of the problem, perhaps they became aware of the problem just…

Yeah, I'm not surprised, since corporations like this are more concerned with making sure the Business Impact Assessment was routed in compliance with Standard Operating Procedures, establishing the Quality Verification Steering Committee to discuss possible impact to critical systems, and getting sign-offs from Validation Specialists and Risk Analysts.

Ask me how I know.

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

#318

Post by lone_haxx0r »

azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default.

[1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923

[2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

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

#319

Post by mokus »

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…

Wow, I have been using iOS (and keeping it up to date) and macOS and Photos.app and uploading images to sites regularly for quite some time and this is the first time I’ve ever even heard of HEIC. Whatever they are doing has been beyond seamless for me.

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

#320

Post by Jach »

Mirioron wrote: post #286
Jach wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though? $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$. If you have a visualizer hooked up while you're typing, even easier. And then there's Mathematica.

What you wrote is almost unreadable to me in the text itself. The only reason I got it is because I recognized the formula from sqrt(b^2 - 4ac). x = (-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a) This, however is somewhat readable. Requiring me to use TeX or Mathematica is what I would consider difficult. Whenever I actually need to write math they won't be available. I'd have more luck using custom emojis as math symbols in most ca…

Ok, how long do you think it'd take to get somewhat comfortable with reading/writing such things? Would it really be "so difficult"? You can also write what you wrote in TeX too, it just won't look as nice in the output and might mislead a reader into thinking a multiplication of s, q, r, t is happening as well as wondering what's going on with the "+-". ± is a symbol too you know.. On Linux it's just compose key then + then -. (Edit: while I'm mentioning it, the compose key is great. Could write it as x = (-b ± √(b² - 4ac))/(2a) -- with √ being compose then v then /, and ² being compose then ^ then 2.)

You can also write that in Mathematica, and it will look nice + understand that sqrt() is the square root function, though I think it will interpret the "+-" as "-".

Under what conditions are you writing math on a computer where you don't have proper tools to do it? (Mathematica isn't the only one, and even if you're using a programming language like Python you can write almost exactly what you wrote by adjusting/clarifying the operators.) Where possibly the most math-written-with-computer happens is MathOverflow, and hey, they use TeX extensively. And when you ask a question, they show a preview below so you can make sure your math is formatted in a readable way too and not just in the easiest way to type.

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