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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

#291

Post by pmichaud »

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…

> letting the students take the test again

Maybe you're not aware of how much time, energy, stress, etc go into taking these tests.

Imagine if your university lost its records of your undergraduate degree and offered to fix the problem by letting you earn your 4 year degree over again. I think you'd agree that wasn't an acceptable solution.

This situation is not that order of magnitude, but it's similar perhaps to taking an entire college course. My wife works with high school kids and they are losing their minds over this, and I think they are justified.

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

#292

Post by IvanK_net »

pkage wrote: post #143
IvanK_net wrote: post #71

I 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…

JPEG is like 50x more complex than PPM, but we eventually moved off that standard as well due to storage size and feature limitations. Plus, it's being adopted by both iPhone and Android--it's not like it's a proprietary format specific only to Apple. Not to mention HEIF/HEIC images take up a fraction of the space of equivalent quality JPEGs, which is significant if you're a shutterbug who fills up their phone with p…

There are many "smart" ways in creating JPGs. JPG compressors improved in recent years. If you have a HEIC image, it can usually be saved as JPG with the same quality, which is larger by only 10 - 15%. The term "fraction" is a complete nonsense.

Also, you can switch your camera settings in the iOS to save a JPG instead.

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

#293

Post by xupybd »

pwthornton wrote: post #111
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…

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…

I don't think it would have been possible to push a fix that quickly. Verification and sign off on these sorts of systems would require weeks or months to push changes.

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

#294

Post by nucleardog »

cozzyd wrote: post #262
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.

You know, I thought that about FAT32. But apparently neither Windows nor Mac OS X can see a FAT32 partition on an SD card if it's not the primary partition (at, least, not in an obvious way).

Don't think that's exclusive to FAT32. For quite a while Windows just straight up ignored anything but the first partition on removeable media.

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

#295

Post by hysan »

acqq wrote: post #102
scott_s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to square this with the fact people pointed out downthread, which is that iPhones will automatically convert HEIC images to jpeg from an HTML input form. Perhaps it's the `isAllowedExtension` check? If `e.target.files` is the actual file names on disk (and not whatever temporary file the browser made out of the HEIC file), that would cause a problem.

Apparently somebody claims to have been able to change the extension and submit the picture, but got "file corrupted" later: "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…

As someone who started their career in QA and volunteered with IT support for non-technical organizations, this is one of the first test cases I would have thought to try.

Never trust user input!

Frontend validation can never be trusted. It’s only good for giving faster feedback for a nicer user experience. You should always have backend validation.

I’ve seen people do some weird stuff before because the majority of users don’t really understand much about file types. Users rename file extension all of the time thinking it’ll magically convert a file into something that can be opened by their program of choice.

This is just poor QA by the College Board.

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

#296

Post by mattkrause »

kleiba wrote: post #214
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…

On the other hand, the article mentions that a demo test did accept (renamed) HEIC files. If you test your setup and are told it works fine, you shouldn't need to dig through FAQs.

I would argue this falls under the equally old jurisdictional principle of estoppel or detrimental reliance.

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

#297

Post by criddell »

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…

I think it's a little ridiculous that they knew this was going to be a problem and didn't do the relatively small amount of work it would have taken to correct the issue.

This makes the College Board look incompetent or uncaring.

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

#298

Post by derefr »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #217
lostlogin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If no format is specified, then the presumption would be that the website wants a raw octet stream, and that adulterating it would be the last thing a client device should do, because it knows nothing about what the website's going to do to the result.

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

#299

Post by azinman2 »

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either specifying the accepted types directly in the web page’s input tag (as many have pointed out, and thus would have just worked correctly in the background), or by accepting and converting HEIC files themselves. At minimum, they should have put their suggested settings changes into the webpage itself before you started, and/or given a practice website to make sure it worked correctly.

College board owns this process, and it’s their job to make sure the setup works correctly for all students, including those who might not all be technically inclined.

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

#300

Post by jimbokun »

Hokusai wrote: post #77

> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs. This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depe…

What regulation would have prevented this bug?
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