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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

#361

Post by JohnTHaller »

eyjafjallajokul wrote: post #351
JohnTHaller wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.

What data are you basing this on?

Pretty much any mobile industry stat. Most have Android at a bit over 50% in the US and Apple at a bit under. Worldwide, Apple is under 20% market share. Remember, iOS is just Apple whereas Android is Samsung + LG + HTC + Google + Oppo + OnePlus + etc...

Examples:

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

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

#362

Post by gbear605 »

qubex wrote: post #251
duiker101 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not unheard that websites do only extension validation for uploads, worth a try!

That totally misses the point though, because if the website only validates on the basis of extension and accepts the format in an unrecognised format, the backend won’t know how to handle it anyway. There’s no point uploading a HEIC file disguised as a PNG (or whatever) if eventually somewhere along the workflow an examiner is actually going to have to open that file in a program that doesn’t know how to parse HEICs…

Perhaps the examiner’s program accepts HEICs and the frontend was unnecessarily limiting. Many systems are like that, and it’s frustrating that the College Board’s wasn’t.

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

#363

Post by xxs »

scott_s wrote: post #121
acqq wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That anecdote is inline with my explanation: the student manually changed the file extension on disk, then uploaded that. That would pass all of the checks, but it would still be in the wrong format, as manually changing the file extension does not cause a conversion to take place on disk, and that probably prevents the automatic conversion of HEIC to jpeg the iPhone itself does on such input fields.

all the checks - a proper check would be reading the contents and parsing the image.

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

#364

Post by kleiba »

mattkrause wrote: post #296
kleiba wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this - reading through the comments, I've been actually quite surprised that the general opinion seems to side with the students. The article suggests that the allowed image formats were clearly defined. Normally, if I were to take this test, I would definitely make sure that I am meeting the technical prerequisites. Of course, you can argue that not everyone is familiar with the technicalities of image…

On the other hand, the article mentions that a demo test did accept (renamed) HEIC files. If you test your setup and are told it works fine, you shouldn't need to dig through FAQs. I would argue this falls under the equally old jurisdictional principle of estoppel or detrimental reliance.

If the system accepted the files, then what was the problem?

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

#365

Post by gbear605 »

rock_artist wrote: post #130

This might sounds trivial. But proprietary codecs are hard for commercial usage. They cost money. If it’s just uploading a file. Ok. But if the system designed to decode it in any way this might lead to more expensive system. The codec “war” and Apple’s decision going with HEIC over opened source WebP is also to be questioned if portability of media is expected.

HEIC isn’t a proprietary codec, it’s an ISO standard

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

#366

Post by gbear605 »

projektfu wrote: post #249

I suppose either they didn’t call Apple up for help or it’s no longer possible to do so in any meaningful way. This is bad press for Apple, too.

The only change they needed to make was one line on their upload form (according to comments elsewhere on the post). This wasn’t an Apple support issue, this was a lack of trying and sufficient testing on the College Board’s part.

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

#367

Post by j45 »

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…

Compatibility with multiples browsers / platforms is usually the responsibility of the website/application.

Historically Apple has implemented what they want to out of various standards, protocols, etc, it shouldn't be a surprise.

Of course, it's not my preference when we're waiting for different operating systems or browsers to behave the same way, but that lack of compatibility has been going on for decades.

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

#368

Post by gbear605 »

gatvol wrote: post #209

If at scale companies are going to deploy new formats at scale they could help out by adding support for said formats to common processing libraries long before the fact.

HEIC has been in wide use for three years now (about half of Americans use it, knowingly or not), and this was a one line change on the upload form that the College Board didn’t include.

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

#369

Post by qubex »

gbear605 wrote: post #360
qubex wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She’s taking an exam. Surely she should understand these things by the end of the curriculum, right? I mean, she’s just been learning them... or should have. Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time (late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as Turing machines, lambda calculus, deci…

Was that all covered by your first semester course? Because if so, that’s more impressive than a first semester course and MIT, CMU, or Harvard, let alone what a public school can offer.

That was covered by a two-year IB (International Baccalaureate) course in Computer Science running from 1997 until 1998. I attended a private school (the International School of Milan).

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

#370

Post by mattkrause »

kleiba wrote: post #364
mattkrause wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the article mentions that a demo test did accept (renamed) HEIC files. If you test your setup and are told it works fine, you shouldn't need to dig through FAQs. I would argue this falls under the equally old jurisdictional principle of estoppel or detrimental reliance.

If the system accepted the files, then what was the problem?

Per the article, the "demo" test accepted it, but the actual exam did not.

Perhaps the demo did something dumb, like check the file extension but not whether the file could actually be opened.

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