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

theverge.com

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

#431

Post by whatatita »

_snsh wrote: post #428
ummonk wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this for comment real? Why should being tech savvy enough to jump through esoteric technical requirements be part of the test?

> esoteric technical requirements Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ? Yes, this comment is for real. I'm the head of IT for a university and we do online applications. We actually accept everything within a given size requirement (which people are unable to respect). I have a bunch of scripts that run over all applications in the end to put them in the right formats, to do OCR for the photos…

> Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ?

Yes, when it is outside of the scope of the test. Unless they're testing the students on their knowledge of data storage, or similar, this is out of scope.

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

#432

Post by bscphil »

cm2187 wrote: post #84

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. It is a problematic form of computer illiteracy.

Yeah, I was going to add that Verge seems confused on this point too.

> 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 it will be converted, but Spencer was still able to submit the demo test with no problem.

> Spencer used the same process on the real exam and thought it went through, but he received an email the next day saying the files were corrupted and that he needed to retake the test. The College Board’s tweet went out just a few hours before Spencer’s scheduled exam; he doesn’t have a Twitter account and didn’t see it.

Obviously changing the file extension just bypassed the filtering that allows the demo test to be submitted. It's just checking that the extension is in a whitelist. There's no "does not guarantee that it will be converted" about this and The Verge's reporting is misleading on that score, IMO. Changing the extension simply does not affect the problem, it just means you're lying to the website about the format of the image.

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

#433

Post by xenonite »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #372
azinman2 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lic…

The whole issue is easily circumvented by correctly setting the accepted inputs, which is clearly the responsibility of the webpage owners. Next time, someone uploads JPEG2000 and runs into the same problem. I guess then it’s again someone else who gets the blame?

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

#434

Post by Mirioron »

Jach wrote: post #329
ativzzz wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you essentially need to learn a pseudo language on top of math to be able to do that. The barrier to entry compared to writing pen and paper is much higher, and math is hard enough for a vast number of Americans.

The context here isn't the average American, but a high school student taking an AP test involving writing math -- where scoring well counts for the same credit as having passed the equivalent entry level course(s) in college. Besides, math is already pseudo language on top of pseudo language. Learning notation is part of math, I'll concede learning to type an expression on a computer is a different notation than wri…

>but if you can't learn that, why learn math?

You can say this, but you won't like the response. The response is probably "okay" and they just won't learn math. I don't think the world is better off when that happens. It's not a question of whether people are capable of doing this, it's a question of whether this is worthwhile.

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

#435

Post by _snsh »

leadingthenet wrote: post #418
kyle-rb wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case From what I've heard in articles and other sources, uploading directly from the iPhone works fine. The issue is only when students try to upload an HEIF file from a computer, instead of directly from an iPhone, which requires: 1. The student has an iPhone, which they use to take a picture of their work. 2. The student chooses not to upload directly from th…

That really doesn’t sound like much of an edge case to me. I’m willing to bet it’s a pretty typical workflow that people have if they own Apple devices.

You would be surprised how many students use an iphone and a macbook but are unwilling to use safari (or icloud, photos) because of privacy concerns.

If you stay in the "regular" apple workflow everything is fine: iphone camera -> icloud/photos (airdrop/photos) -> safari. If you deviate at certain points though the workflow breaks down. Whose fault is that?

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

#436

Post by bscphil »

RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #315
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 g…

> if you're in high school in 2020 you probably need an iPhone

Not disputing anything else in your comment, but where is this true? I go to (and work at) a fairly prestigious university, and even here it's at best a status symbol, not a "need" of any kind. One of my friends uses a flip phone.

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

#437

Post by WillDaSilva »

cesarb wrote: post #359
MattGaiser wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> image viewers do not trust the file extension and ignore it Not all of them; for instance, if I rename a .jpg to a .png exension and try to open it with Gnome's EOG, it presents an error saying "Not a PNG file", instead of showing the image.

A behaviour which I'm quite fond of, as it allows me to fix the file extensions. I generally don't like relying on the file extension for information, but it helps me keep my media collection clean in this case. It'd be ideal if it displayed the image anyway, while also displaying a warning message that says the extension doesn't match the actual file type.

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

#438

Post by _snsh »

whatatita wrote: post #431
_snsh wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> esoteric technical requirements Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ? Yes, this comment is for real. I'm the head of IT for a university and we do online applications. We actually accept everything within a given size requirement (which people are unable to respect). I have a bunch of scripts that run over all applications in the end to put them in the right formats, to do OCR for the photos…

> Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ? Yes, when it is outside of the scope of the test. Unless they're testing the students on their knowledge of data storage, or similar, this is out of scope.

Well, I disagree. I think "media competence" is more important than spelling or grammar and should be something expected of someone entering tertiary education.

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

#439

Post by bscphil »

winter_blue wrote: post #25

Someone at the College Board just needs to write a few lines of code to convert HEIC images to JPEG, instead of forcing thousands (if not more) students to retake the test. On Ubuntu, you can: sudo apt-get install libheif-examples heif-convert infile.heif outfile.jpg Based on the article, it sounds like the College Board did actually receive the test files from these students. The students were emailed that the files…

It seems pretty clear that there are at least some cases in which the test was dropped / failed entirely because of the issue, including the case that The Verge leads with:

> Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles, had just completed his AP English Literature and Composition test last week. But when he snapped a photo of a written answer with his iPhone and attempted to upload it to the testing portal, it stopped responding.

> The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out. Bryner failed the test. He’s retaking it in a few weeks.

In this case it seems unlikely that the issue is correctable after the fact by the College Board.

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