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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

#221

Post by kristopolous »

Spivak wrote: post #181
kristopolous wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a naive extension filter then passed off to a well implemented image conversion routine that the programmer just invoked in their script. So you need to do some little dance to get around it. You can probably run full blown postscript programs on their server if you simply name it .jpg. College board is a $1 billion/year "not for profit" with a million dollar CEO, there's no excuse for this.

Sure but they're expressly not a $1 billion/year software company. They are a pen-and-paper company that because of the pandemic had to build something quickly with little institutional experience.

Digital literacy from an organization in charge of a standardized test for 6,000 colleges including Princeton, Harvard and MIT isn't too much to ask for in 2020.

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

#222

Post by Jach »

vaidhy wrote: post #124
nmstoker wrote: post #74

Clearly needs to be solved and fast, and I have huge sympathy for those affected. However to me the more interesting point is why anyone would want to submit a handwritten script when they could type it. Not to sound like an old foggey, but in my day the only people who got to type were dyslexic and it gave them a huge advantage (no doubt why so many parents were having their children tested). Even if you could write…

AP stat/ AP Chem/ AP Phys etc are about math formulae and explaining the calculation. I do not want my kids to learn TeX or figure out word formula editor just before the AP exams.

I would have preferred taking AP stats/physics/CS/Calculus with a computer, and that was over a decade ago. (AP French also used cassette tapes to record yourself with. Looks like they transitioned to the modern digital age in 2017, but I'm sure every year before then they had a sizable number of students with blank tape or broken tape submissions.)

I had already taught myself the basic TeX for math formulas before I took any AP test that could have used it, I even set up a PHP portal to do simple chemical equation balancing that would use LaTeX behind the scenes and spit out PNGs. There are nice JS libraries to do everything client-side now, so in any online portal it could be seamlessly mixed in with a reference and live-preview right next to it. All I'm saying is it's really not hard -- you can learn what you need in under an hour -- and if you step back and think about the type of student taking these tests they're also the type of student likely to pursue these subjects in college, so they're likely going to have to learn much more of LaTeX eventually anyway.

Where neither plain text nor LaTeX help much is when you really need to draw something out. I'd say mouse drawings are better than nothing, but you can also just remove questions/scoring that rely on display of such. Nothing stops a student from drawing privately on their own paper -- indeed as I recall a lot of the questions from some of those AP tests were exactly like that: do your work on paper you throw out after, because the answer is multiple choice.

It's really most surprising that they didn't go with a fully online test (which means no manual submission of purely offline artifacts) and haven't been preparing for such at all over the years...

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

#223

Post by jchw »

OK, I honestly don’t blame them for not supporting HEIC yet. What I do blame them for is clearly not testing their system against the software and hardware students will be using. There would’ve been no problems at all if the system handled the problem and explained how to resolve it, but it sounds like it failed in a somewhat more silent fashion. Without question, they should be resolving this problem on their end.

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

#224

Post by gowld »

Mirioron wrote: post #199
vaidhy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AP stat/ AP Chem/ AP Phys etc are about math formulae and explaining the calculation. I do not want my kids to learn TeX or figure out word formula editor just before the AP exams.

This brings up an interesting point: how come math input is so difficult on a computer? Even TeX seems like an awful solution for this.

Ask a Chinese or Japanese friend why typing is hard.

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

#225

Post by dv_dt »

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…

The college board is a pretty badly managed technology and testing monopoly (duopoly). e.g. retrieval of scores in past years for the SAT was gated by region, but if you got on a VPN you could get your scores from unreleased regions. I had a niece provide their credentials to a sketchy website that in the end delivered scores "early", but there was a talk about online security afterwards with the parents and the neice.

I do have some mixed sympathy for having to set up a whole new online testing scheme for the tests due to Covid, but their approach was so odd. Students were also instructed to compose text answers outside the test pages, and copy and paste them into answer boxes. An odd & ugly solution, but it points to at least some thought about trying to mitigate unreliabilities.

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

#226

Post by Alupis »

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…

Scanners almost universally output in TIFF, and need to be converted to JPG or something more universally accepted. Nobody complains.

Some scanners even will do the conversion to JPG for you, because they know nobody accepts TIFF files.

If Apple does it, then everyone has to accept it?

And why? Because images are large and Apple's trying to reduce the size on the phone? How about giving everyone more than 5GB of iCloud storage in 2020? Google gives you 10-15GB for free, and costs half as much for more storage.

For premium-priced devices, this is absurd.

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

#227

Post by save_ferris »

bchociej wrote: post #218
save_ferris wrote: post #203

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…

.

> Sorry, Apple buyers, but you've purchased a device that flaunts standards, and you must expect it to cause problems.

Sounds like you're putting blame on the students in this situation.

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

#228

Post by sixstringtheory »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #178
Hokusai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? It works for building regulations, for electric regulations, for food safety regulations, for all the rest of industries actually. If anything we see people dying because that regulations are not enforced or are removed after lobbying. So, software is not going to be "better" but more reliable and a less costly foundation for the rest of business and industrie…

lol "works" Regulate software and you will kill it.

One has to wonder how Salesforce ever got their huge glass building in the SF skyline, what with all the regulations preventing anything from working.

Engineering is all about working within constraints. Too many people in software just want to do everything their way, oftentimes what they see as the easiest and quickest way, without worrying about how it affects other people.

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

#229

Post by oefrha »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #204
mfarris wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come. When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.

You're correct, I shouldn't have said their own unique format. Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet). And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwar…

> They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support

They do.

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