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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

#211

Post by dylancop »

realityking wrote: post #202
dylancop wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.

Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.

>Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere.

Funny thing to say in support of Apple. Maybe they should support WEBPs/WEBMs instead?

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

#212

Post by mrlala »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #170
mrlala wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.

People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer

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...

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

#213

Post by walshemj »

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…

One might also ask why in 2020 your taking an exam and then photographing it.

Some of those with problems actually had real computers as well.

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

#214

Post by kleiba »

vaidhy wrote: post #134

I do not understand this huge criticism against college board for this. My daughter took 5 AP exams this time and we got multiple remainders from her teachers and AP board that HEIC will not work. Here is the relevant FAQ: Can student submit an HEIC file of a photo of their handwritten work? Recent iPhones and iPads save photos as HEIC files. HEIC photo files can’t be submitted “as is” in the online exam. They must b…

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 formats. But then again, let's not forget that today's students are "digital natives", so I assume they both now about JPEG and PNG and also about their phones.

However, if I now hear that this point was explicitly addressed in relevant FAQ's, all of the above really becomes irrelevant in my opinion, because it really doesn't leave much in terms of excuses.

At college, every test came with certain rules. For this exam, you're allowed to use any auxiliaries except computers. And stuff like that. You must write in permanent ink. etc. Images must be in one of the following format: ... IMO is just along the same lines.

There is an old principle in jurisdiction: ignorantia juris non excusat - basically stating that it's your responsibility to know the rules.

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

#215

Post by rgovostes »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #142
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…

While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization." Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the…

It's funny because the Lighting connector has been around since 2012, when Android phones were largely using Micro USB, with an awkward flirtation with the wide USB3 connector. Now they're standardizing on USB-C, so if you were upgrading frequently you may have needed 3 cables in the past 8 years.

Before then iPhones used the 30-pin connector, backwards compatible with 5-year-old iPod accessories. At that time other manufactures seemed to be shipping different barrel-plug chargers and proprietary cables for every model.

So that's 2 connectors introduced over a span of 18 years supported by dozens of product models that sold billions of units. Cables have been available from third parties for most of that time. The only dongles that might apply are 30-pin to Lightning or USB-A to USB-C.

The 30-pin's raison d'être was to provide features you couldn't get out of USB, like analog audio and video out. And Lightning was a much better designed connector than Micro USB due to being reversible, which informed the design of the Type C connector.

I'd agree that the Mac now has a dongle problem, but it's precisely _because_ it switched to USB-C, as you suggested.

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

#216

Post by moron4hire »

tomc1985 wrote: post #195
xienyc wrote: post #101

Earlier 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…

Is it really so tough to shove an HEIC-to-JPEG converter in their pipeline?

Seriously, it's not. It's an attribute setting on the file input field. The iPhone will do the conversion itself, it just needs to actually be told what to convert to, rather than having to guess.

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

#217

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lostlogin wrote: post #193
Alupis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEIC isn't supported in a lot of places. It's mainly (only?) Apple that uses it with iOS devices. Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too. JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.

> Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Further down this thread you’ll see that the board have messed up and they aren’t accepting images they should due to poor implementation. “ oefrha 1 hour ago [–] Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to…

I'd posit that Apple ought to assume the worst (ie nothing but JPEG and PNG is supported) if no format is specified. That's how we've built most of the web, to ensure backwards compatibility and avoid these kinds of problems.

That said, come on College Board. Fix your crap. What a stupid bug.

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

#218

Post by bchociej »

save_ferris wrote: post #203
bchociej wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

So why should a student with an Apple product be punished for hostile moves Apple has made? What if the school issued the device the student took the test on? You're punishing the wrong party here. And knowing that these big companies do stupid stuff around standards is part of building software. This isn't any different from the browser wars. It's completely unrealistic to expect developers to not have to deal with…

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

#220

Post by jaybeeayyy »

xienyc wrote: post #101
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…

>"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?
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