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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

#371

Post by qubex »

gbear605 wrote: post #362
qubex wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The examiner’s client program is likely a browser that connects to a web-hosted system, and with the exception of Safari, other browsers do not (yet) handle HEIC natively nor even gracefully.

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

#372

Post by lone_haxx0r »

azinman2 wrote: post #354
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think both parties are at fault The testing system for not using the tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents. > It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. It's reasonable to assume that it is. 2. Sure, the college c…

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers. 2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound s…

2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

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

#373

Post by gbear605 »

theodric wrote: post #159

Typical Apple, trying to force some technically-superior crap down our throats rather than attempting to play nice with the rest of the world. Nobody else uses HEIC. I daresay most people don't even know what it is. Why not play nice with others by default!?

Samsung uses it too. And the iPhone automatically converts it to jpegs, but the College Board’s form disabled that functionality.

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

#374

Post by gbear605 »

junaru wrote: post #146
bchociej wrote: post #127

.

This, last time i encountered it even windows 10 didn't display them and wanted me to buy a decoder from windows store. This was probably due to licensing fees. This story shows what happens when you 'think different' from established standards.

HEIC is a ISO standard that has a free codec.

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

#375

Post by johnp_ »

scott_s wrote: post #305
hamandcheese wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that accept is specified only with extensions rather than mime types.

I wondered that, too, but I couldn't find any HTML documentation that blessed one form as superior to the other. And I would be surprised if Apple automatically converted images for "accept=image/jpg" but not "accept=.jpg".

Here's the spec:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input...

> Authors are encouraged to specify both any MIME types and any corresponding extensions when looking for data in a specific format.

> User agents should prevent the user from selecting files that are not accepted by one (or more) of these tokens.

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

#376

Post by root_axis »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #331
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…

Even more strange is that when the file failed to parse after uploading, they just threw out the files instead of keeping them to analyze later. If they still had the uploads they could go back and convert them properly and apologize for the delay. It's just bad engineering all around. Even if there was a less glaringly obvious bug that caused parsing to fail, how would they debug that parsing bug without a sample fi…

I mean it's not that odd when you think about how software is typically written. The parsing logic probably threw an exception that was never handled and just pops everything uploaded off the stack by default.

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

#377

Post by cycomanic »

mrlala wrote: post #198
Alupis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's the iPhone that's broken then. HEIC isn't exactly a commonly used, or widely accepted image format outside of Apple's world.

Just a guess, but it seems like you work in theoretical lala land and never have to deliver something that works. I'm not saying you are wrong- sure you can argue that it's the iPhone that is broken, from a non-standard format. However, if you are designing an app that needs pictures to be taken and about 45% of your customers (the students) can't just take a picture without going through some conversion while on a t…

Well I could turn that around and say if you develop a phone and the image format it exports to is not accepted by 99% of websites maybe then you majorly fucked up.

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

#378

Post by stefan_ »

7786655 wrote: post #210
Spivak wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

On the other hand, I think there's an argument to be made software should ignore file extensions whenever possible. Is really that hard for the backend to check if the file starts with "\xFF\xD8\xFF\xE0\0\x10JFIF\0\1" or "\x89PNG\r\n\x1A\n"? That would have caught this problem.

Yes, just hardcode what is hopefully the magic bytes for the formats we expect, what could possibly go wrong /s

The biggest joke here is that this wouldn't have helped the students either. I don't think any of them will pass the "there is a minute left on the timer and the website tells you your picture isn't JPEG or PNG" challenge.

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

#379

Post by gbear605 »

supernova87a wrote: post #115

I think this year is going to have to be written off in terms of secondary education. These AP tests, which are already probably one of the few objective competence-based exams, are going to be not trustworthy given all these issues. While probably not being grossly cheated on under this new format by huge numbers of students, it just is not believable that they're producing results fairly comparable with controlled…

The problem is that we already don’t care about the learning, just the credentials. Everyone making these accommodations is doing so because they know that there’s no point on holding students back when it doesn’t help anyone to do so. Certainly not the students, but also not the school systems, the colleges, the future employers, and not even society generally.

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

#380

Post by vosper »

megiddo wrote: post #128
vosper wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Why shouldn't that work? I think it would be pretty great if changing the file extension popped up a helper that asked me if I wanted to convert from HEIC to JPG? Really, no-one should have to think about file formats when they're trying to do something that has nothing intrinsically…

Maybe for common formats, but that assumes the file was correctly named to start with. It also assumes there's a trivial or reasonable conversion between formats. What happens if I rename a CAD file to MP3? The failure of engineering was clearly with the test authors - they should have been validating their inputs.

> What happens if I rename a CAD file to MP3?

"This kind of file is for a [computer-aided design system]. It is not an [MP3 music] file and so it cannot be used by [music playing software]. Would you still like to rename the file?"

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