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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

#481

Post by xvector »

mywittyname wrote: post #120

I think this is on Apple more than anyone. They have the attitude that it's okay to break long-standing traditions for the sake of pushing society into the future. Apple users seem to be a-okay with this attitude, so I'm not surprised that it has eventually come to kick users in the ass. The three years or so that they've been using the format by default is not enough time to catch up. I know this is the first I've h…

This is a ridiculous statement. It’s the College Board’s job to validate input files. How incompetent do you have to be to just fail if someone uploads a different format? That is absurdly unacceptable for the multi-billion dollar industry that the College aboard is.

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

#482

Post by xvector »

kassouni wrote: post #54

The College Board is an absurd monopoly. Students have no other option than to pay them egregious fees for taking/sending tests. Of course it's going to be run poorly.

Yup, there is no incentive for the College Board to improve because they know they have every students’ future by the balls. What are the kids going to do, protest or abstain? Good luck getting into a good college!

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

#483

Post by xvector »

qubex wrote: post #219

I know this is mean of me, but the student who was taking her Computer Science exam and who apparently thought that changing the file’s extension would change format? Yeah... she deserved to fail.

The blame is as much on the OS manufacturers who haven’t implemented such an obvious and trivial UX workflow.

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

#484

Post by xvector »

MikusR wrote: post #330
jchw wrote: post #223

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.

They did not anticipate idiots renaming files to "convert" them.

It is incompetent programming no matter how you slice it. Extension validation is not input validation. Whoever wrote that code is more idiotic than any of the students because basic input validation was literally their job here.

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

#485

Post by xvector »

theodric wrote: post #159

Typical Apple, trying to force some technically-superior crap down our throats rather than attempting to play nice with the rest of the world. Nobody else uses HEIC. I daresay most people don't even know what it is. Why not play nice with others by default!?

Blaming Apple for this is ridiculous. It is trivial to validate input, and it is trivial to do so in a way that the iPhone will upload JPEG by default.

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

#486

Post by xvector »

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…

.

Editing your comments simply because you were shown your mistakes is ridiculous. Own up to your mistakes please.

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

#487

Post by spideymans »

_snsh wrote: post #428
ummonk wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this for comment real? Why should being tech savvy enough to jump through esoteric technical requirements be part of the test?

> esoteric technical requirements Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ? Yes, this comment is for real. I'm the head of IT for a university and we do online applications. We actually accept everything within a given size requirement (which people are unable to respect). I have a bunch of scripts that run over all applications in the end to put them in the right formats, to do OCR for the photos…

You’re vastly overestimating the competence of the average computer user. There’s a sizeable minority of people out there that don’t know what file extensions are, and even if they do know about them, they might not understand how they work (hence students attempting to convert file types by changing the extension).

File extensions are an implementation detail that, ideally, end users should never be forced to think about. There are graceful solutions to this problem; the College Board just didn’t do their due diligence.

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

#488

Post by mlyle »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #372
azinman2 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers. 2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound s…

2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license. But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to lic…

The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.

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

#489

Post by _snsh »

thomasfedb wrote: post #471
_snsh wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you want to use a cell phone and/or a computer to complete your tasks you should have some basic knowledge about how it operates. You can shift responsibility for that knowledge wherever you want but I would say that at the age between 16 and 19 (which google tells me is the average age for AP classes) I would expect that knowledge from someone applying for AP credit. And if someone didn't know what the accep…

I'm unsure that any of these students wanted to take their AP exams on their phone or computer. That this is a new problem suggests that this is something they've been newly forced to deal with. It's certainly not a well engineered user experience. Passing a physics test should require physics knowledge, not knowledge of image formats. I think understanding of image formats is actually fairly obscure outside of techn…

[flagged]

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

#490

Post by mlyle »

Gaelan wrote: post #346
tantalor wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.

Maybe they should just pay the $5 fee...
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