iPhones are used by >80% of US teens. It's unfathomable that who ever wrote the College Board software thought it was acceptable to have this defect. What were they testing it against?
Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
281–290 of 577 posts
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#282Earlier 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…
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…
ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours to hack together an interim solution.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#283I am 100% on the side of the school. Unlike with JPEG, everybody who wants to work with HEIC should pay licence fees. Also, HEIC is like 50x more complex than JPEG. I hope the world will never get to a point, where each phone brand stores photos in their own format, and you need a special software from the phone manufacturer to view the photos (that is what we have now with raw photography formats, and what we used t…
Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?
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Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#284I am 100% on the side of the school. Unlike with JPEG, everybody who wants to work with HEIC should pay licence fees. Also, HEIC is like 50x more complex than JPEG. I hope the world will never get to a point, where each phone brand stores photos in their own format, and you need a special software from the phone manufacturer to view the photos (that is what we have now with raw photography formats, and what we used t…
Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?
Of course not. But if we are talking about replacing JPG, two things are necessary: a new format should not be restricted by patents and licence fees, and such movement has to be coordinated with all other "players" in the industry. Apple did not do any of it.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not though? $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$. If you have a visualizer hooked up while you're typing, even easier. And then there's Mathematica.
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.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not though? $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$. If you have a visualizer hooked up while you're typing, even easier. And then there's Mathematica.
What you wrote is almost unreadable to me in the text itself. The only reason I got it is because I recognized the formula from sqrt(b^2 - 4ac).
x = (-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)
This, however is somewhat readable. Requiring me to use TeX or Mathematica is what I would consider difficult. Whenever I actually need to write math they won't be available. I'd have more luck using custom emojis as math symbols in most cases.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#287Earlier 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…
> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.
iOS's market share in the US is 61.25% according to [1].
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time to set up a family 1password, or if you're up for teaching your family, keepass.
Not on school-owned devices :-/ (but for something like school app/site passwords, though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine )
Sounds like the school owned device needs to come pre-installed with a password manager then, at least for school related activities.
> though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine
This works, until you have to bring the paper to school where your kids friends will inevitably find the paper and login and mess with their stuff (source: I was that friend)
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#289Earlier 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…
> 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 At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot . How hard could that have possibly been?
Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out.
This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not though. You just type out the pronunciation and pick from a list if there are multiple. I'm actually surprised we don't have something like that for standard math input.