I love cheap labour. Seriously you get what you pay for and no one wants to fucking pay what good software is worth.
Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
541–550 of 577 posts
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#542A lot of comments are arguing about whether the software should have been modified to accept the HEIC format. Let's go with "no" for the sake of argument. They probably can't accept an mp3 of me singing my answers, either. But! If I upload an HEIC, an mp3, a keynote file, or anything else unacceptable... Why doesn't the site provide an immediate "File format not accepted, please upload .gif, .jpg, or .png" message? A…
It should go a bit further than what you're suggesting even. Any half-serious upload of a document or image now, less high stakes than a CB test, generally displays the file you upload for you to verify. Ie, "here's what we have from what you uploaded. Is this ok?"
The college board should have had a list of accepted formats, should have included instructions that they put in the tweet in the upload UI, and should have had an uploaded document verification process. This is solely the responsibility of the CB, and is deceitful at some level, by leading students to believe they were complying when they were not.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#543A lot of comments are arguing about whether the software should have been modified to accept the HEIC format. Let's go with "no" for the sake of argument. They probably can't accept an mp3 of me singing my answers, either. But! If I upload an HEIC, an mp3, a keynote file, or anything else unacceptable... Why doesn't the site provide an immediate "File format not accepted, please upload .gif, .jpg, or .png" message? A…
It does have pretty much exactly that message. The corruption problems came from students seeing that only PNGs/JPGs were allowed, then trying to "convert" the file just by renaming it. What they're doing is the same as 99% of other sites that expect images. But it's probably fair to expect it to be even more streamlined (i.e: clear conversion instructions) given the circumstances of a time-limited exam.
I don't understand why no one is blaming the education system?
How is it possible that students that are being considered for "advanced placement" are not familiar with file formats?
how horrible and backward your education system must be? This belongs to basic literacy in the modern world.
Note we're not speaking about old people who were exposed to files for the first time while they had to balance a family life and other responsibilities.
We're speaking about people that were forced to spend more than half of their lives learning !!!
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
By default, both Windows and MacOS hide file extensions. Smart phones almost universally hide them, if they give you a file explorer at all. I suspect most teenagers (and that's what we're talking about here - 17, 18 years olds finishing secondary school) would have a notion that jpg and gif are image formats, and pdf and dcx are a document formats. I suspect few would know much beyond that, and most would not have h…
> I suspect few would know much beyond that, and most would not have had much reason to worry about converting between formats. Ok, first of, why should I (as an institution) care about the people unable to fulfil the conditions of my test? Maybe I only want people with a basic understanding of file formats because chances are they will have less issues with future applications? > They did need to provide detailed in…
> Ok, first of, why should I (as an institution) care about the people unable to fulfil the conditions of my test?
Maybe you (as an institution) care about all your students?
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable That's like telling people what brand of pencil they are allowed to use to mark paper. It's not germane to the test and improperly shifts the burden to the student when the technology to automatically screen already exists.
It might be like saying the students are only allowed to mark their answers in blue ink or black and no other colour rather than saying it's a particular brand.
Everyone can look at a pen stroke and identify the color.
Can you say the same about a photo and identifying the file format?
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…
Taking the test again is a horrible solution. How is that ok?
Yeah, what a weird "solution" to be okay with. Wonder if they'd be as okay with repeating a workday because their hours weren't logged due to a system error.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one rational feels sorry for universities.
No one rational makes absolute comments on the internet. Maybe university IT departments are staffed by people. Maybe even at the college board it's just some IT guys trying to keep a shitty platform working. Maybe they did the best they could working within their constraints and they expected the same from students who have a vested interest in getting their results submitted. Maybe this is just much ado about nothi…
I don't see why you'd assume that the students did anything less than their best.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does have pretty much exactly that message. The corruption problems came from students seeing that only PNGs/JPGs were allowed, then trying to "convert" the file just by renaming it. What they're doing is the same as 99% of other sites that expect images. But it's probably fair to expect it to be even more streamlined (i.e: clear conversion instructions) given the circumstances of a time-limited exam.
I don't understand why no one is blaming the education system? How is it possible that students that are being considered for "advanced placement" are not familiar with file formats? how horrible and backward your education system must be? This belongs to basic literacy in the modern world. Note we're not speaking about old people who were exposed to files for the first time while they had to balance a family life an…
Because in a world where apps do everything for you and 80% of your use is on a phone and the remaining 20% is either for a once a year use case, you don't need to worry about image formats.
Even as a software engineer, I haven't used a desktop or windows in 5 years. I haven't used TheGimp (or any other non web/app image manipulation software) in 3 years.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but that's not what the written code does.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure how you typically write software, but I don't consider it typical for software that opens a file and encounters unexpected input to throw an exception and then delete the file . If an exception is thrown and not caught, the software should stop doing anything.
As I said, the file data was likely popped off the stack automatically, no need to write any extra code.