Students Are Failing AP Tests Because the College Boards Can't Handle HEIC Images (theverge.com) 204
Many high school students around the country completed Advanced Placement tests online last week but were unable to submit them at the end because the testing portal doesn't support HEIC images -- the default format on iOS devices and some newer Android phones. The Verge reports: For the uninitiated: AP exams require longform answers. Students can either type their response or upload a photo of handwritten work. Students who choose the latter option can do so as a JPG, JPEG, or PNG format according to the College Board's coronavirus FAQ. But the testing portal doesn't support the default format on iOS devices and some newer Android phones, HEIC files. HEIC files are smaller than JPEGs and other formats, thus allowing you to store a lot more photos on an iPhone. 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.
[Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles] says many of his classmates also tried to submit iPhone photos and experienced the same problem. The issue was so common that his school's AP program forwarded an email from the College Board to students on Sunday including tidbits of advice to prevent submission errors. "What's devastating is that thousands of students now have an additional three weeks of stressful studying for retakes," Bryner said. The email Bryner received doesn't mention the HEIC format, though it does link to the College Board's website, which instructs students with iPhones to change their camera settings so that photos save as JPEGs rather than HEICs. The company also linked to that information in a tweet early last week. In a statement emailed to The Verge, the College Board said that "the vast majority of students successfully completed their exams" in the first few days of online testing, "with less than 1 percent unable to submit their responses." The company also noted that "We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to submit responses."
[Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles] says many of his classmates also tried to submit iPhone photos and experienced the same problem. The issue was so common that his school's AP program forwarded an email from the College Board to students on Sunday including tidbits of advice to prevent submission errors. "What's devastating is that thousands of students now have an additional three weeks of stressful studying for retakes," Bryner said. The email Bryner received doesn't mention the HEIC format, though it does link to the College Board's website, which instructs students with iPhones to change their camera settings so that photos save as JPEGs rather than HEICs. The company also linked to that information in a tweet early last week. In a statement emailed to The Verge, the College Board said that "the vast majority of students successfully completed their exams" in the first few days of online testing, "with less than 1 percent unable to submit their responses." The company also noted that "We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to submit responses."
I thought iOS auto-converted to JPEG (Score:5, Informative)
I thought when Apple first added this ... "feature" ... they claimed that it would automatically convert to JPEG when you attempted to "share" photos outside of the Apple ecosystem. Sounds to me like the problem is on Apple's end, not the website.
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automatically convert to JPEG (...) outside of the Apple ecosystem
oxymoron.
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I don't remember when it happened, but it seems like at some point with my current iPhone 8+ that all the photos I took off it were JPEG and then all of the sudden apps that would copy them off the phone (Dropbox, or something) started copying them off as .HEIC files instead of JPEG.
It's not "hard" to convert them, but is kind of a nuisance because even Windows 10 doesn't always handle the format without a codec download. I can only imagine how much further incompatible they are with other systems.
Re:I thought iOS auto-converted to JPEG (Score:5, Informative)
That's a good question. I just tried uploading some photos to a couple of different websites, and they all received JPEG pictures. When I email something, it also goes through as a JPEG. If I choose "Save to Files" to save it to my Samba server it saves as an HEIC file. I had to use heif-convert to convert those files to JPEG. On Ubuntu, get this with:
I didn't test it, but I imagine that saving the pictures to a cloud like Dropbox or OneDrive would maintain HEIC format.
I just noticed that they have a test exam [collegeboard.org] available. I tried it on my phone and it uploaded correctly in JPEG format. I suspect that the problem must be with people who save their pictures to their computers in a way that maintains the HEIC format and upload them that way, because doing it from the phone does exactly what Apple said it would - converts to a more compatible format. Either that, or they fixed their submission system so that it works now.
Try editing image first (Score:3)
I didn't test it, but I imagine that saving the pictures to a cloud like Dropbox or OneDrive would maintain HEIC format.
If I use AirDrop to drop an image to my desktop, it saves as HEIC...
Unless I choose to edit the image in any way (open image in Photos, edit, choose auto-fix works well). Then if I save that and transmit, it goes up as JPEG - and probably would for other systems as well that are getting HEIC.
To add to the complication, there is also a flag somewhere in settings about preserving as HEIC I
Re: Try editing image first (Score:3)
A HEIC file is not a RAW image: itâ(TM)s already been processed by software and rendered and compressed to something else. By all means use HEIC files to preserve as much of the original rendering as possible and reduce storage requirements, but please do not call it a RAW image. A RAW image is unprocessed sensor data and cannot be viewed without some sort of processing and rendering - look at Adobe tools like Adobe Camera Raw or Photoshop to see what processing needs to be applied before any renderi
Re: I thought iOS auto-converted to JPEG (Score:5, Funny)
You are uploading it wrong.
Handwritten? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have a computer on which you can submit the exam, why would you hand write the answers?
Re:Handwritten? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Handwritten? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most HS students don't have the time to learn TeX, ASCIImath, or any other typesetting software during an AP exam. Also this is quite an inelegant way of working through a problem and is fraught with it's own problems.
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The combination of silicon valley arrogance and users' inability to troubleshoot the problem or develop their own workarounds to that arrogance is unavoidable. There is no such thing as a perfectly usable system with no edge cases. That's why doing things like switching to some new flashy image format that nothing supports but thinking you solved the usability problems by building in conversion support is stupid. Don't use unsupported formats and protocols.
For the second, it really isn't. I took AP courses
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You can always write your thought process using keyboard, too. Unless it's specifically graphical.
I would wager that more than half of the things you're required to put down in an exam are specifically graphical, or graphical enough that pen and paper is far easier than typing. Unless you like wasting time in the middle of an exam looking up the symbol editor finding that greek letter or figuring out how to subscript or superscript something.
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Your response is your work, presumably.
Your response is your answer. That typically gets you a couple of marks. Is it your work? How do we know? There are plenty of subjects out there where you can google an answer. It's far more difficult to google your work.
Saw this on a math test recently. Looking at just the answers we wouldn't have been able to tell students apart, however looking at the submitted working out we suddenly found 4-5 well below average kids submit correct answers but using a calculation method they haven't been taught and that
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If you have a computer on which you can submit the exam, why would you hand write the answers?
Not everyone can use a keyboard and mouse as well as they can use a pencil and paper.
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If you have a computer on which you can submit the exam, why would you hand write the answers?
This is a general requirement. We do that with our kids too. All piece of paper need to be submitted, the correct answer is only a small portion of your grade for the assignment.
We also get all students to write their name on every page, and take a selfie* with the last page of their test so we can verify that they submitted their own working and match the handwriting (caught out two cheaters already passing their exam to someone off screen to answer).
*The first time we did this hilarity ensured when a stud
Smaller pics? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Smaller pics? (Score:2)
Smaller than JPG+MOV, no?
Re: Smaller pics? (Score:2)
MOV is a container similar to base ISO format (MP4). The video bitstream is either HEVC or AVC in this case.
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Other way around. Apple created MOV as the container for the QuickTime video format back in the 90s. The MPEG-LA adopted a subset of the MOV format as part of MPEG4 standard. In addition, a subset of that is the 3gp format. A standard QuickTime parser can handle MP4 and 3GP formats with no issue since they're just subsets.
As far as I can tell, the main things are simply less codecs supported and less
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So ...
Just doesn't work?
(Working is doing what the customer wants, not what Apple decides you want).
Which is why I use Huawei.
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From experience with Apple users most of them don't seem to be "happy" as much as utterly unaware that there are other, frequently better, ways to do a task. To the majority (excluding the typical /. user, of course) the Walled Garden is the whole world.
Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Instructions were given on how to save the images properly. Did they not read those instructions? Preparation is the key to success. They are partially to blame. Hopefully, lesson learned.
The site, however, should have detected the invalid format and alerted the student along with instructions why it failed to upload properly.
Re:Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The college board tweeted the info just minutes before students took the test. It's not reasonable to expect students to check company twitter minutes ahead of time.
College Board should have been able to read .heic files. If it couldn't read these files, it definitely shouldn't have given a valid error message instead of crashing. Ultimately, students will fail AP classes because of easily foreseeable issues that have nothing to do with academic knowledge.
It's not reasonable to blame Apple or Samsung here. They should only use .jpg files, just in case some dumb-ass company requires jpg files without letting anybody know, and crashes if it receives anything besides .jpg files?
Re:Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
They should not default to using weird file formats that almost nothing understands. Defaults like that take decades to change properly.
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.BMP!!!
Re: Yet... (Score:5, Informative)
It's also been the standard format *only* on one major smart phone. There's a reason for that: It's patent-encumbered. Apple loves this, because they are part of the patent consortium behind it. But it means that none of the open-source web browsers will process it.
Conversely, the WebP format - designed by google, but without such patent issues - is now supported by all major web browsers... except for Safari and the iOS browser.
It's the old HTML video battle all over again: Rival factions backing different technologies, and deliberately refusing to support anything that the other does.
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It's the old HTML video battle all over again: Rival factions backing different technologies, and deliberately refusing to support anything that the other does.
HTML Video battle, don't you mean Westinghouse vs Edison electrification battle? How many dogs has Apple killed by making them look at pixelated jpegs?
This reminds me more of the Apple FireWire situation. FireWire was the superior external connectivity solution when it was introduced. Everyone wanted to use it for everything, and Firewire could do everything. Intel was even ready to build it into standard chipsets, but then Jobs got greedy. He wanted $1 per port in licensing. That was too much for the
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but for the College Board to process those images they have to pay Apple (and the rest of the consortium) royalties for the interpreter, don't they? Sounds like another win for Apple and loss for their victims, er, I mean customers.
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Please be an ironic comment...
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Itâ(TM)s not a weird format, itâ(TM)s been the standard format on a major smart phone for several years.
That's great for your smartphone. Not so great for a website or the internet. It definitely *is* a weird format by every definition. Just because one vendor supports it doesn't change that.
Itâ(TM)s also a major step forward from jpeg, which people have been trying to find a way to improve for years.
So was WebP, so was JPEG2000, so were the many other improvements in between. There's a reason we still use JPEG. It's good enough, and critically in an era where storage and bandwidth is cheap the benefits over JPEG start dropping exclusively down to features, and your smartphone isn't benefiting from 16bit storage.
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Itâ(TM)s not a weird format, itâ(TM)s been the standard format on a major smart phone for several years.
That sounds like a different way of saying "Nothing else uses it".
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College Board should have been able to read .heic files.
AP Students should not have had a problem.
Advanced "except too stupid to do this one simple thing right" Placement?
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Ultimately, students will fail AP classes ...
The students will have an opportunity to retake the test in June.
Re:Yet... (Score:4, Funny)
>It's not reasonable to blame Apple or Samsung here. They should only use .jpg files, just in case some dumb-ass company requires jpg files without letting anybody know, and crashes if it receives anything besides .jpg files?
Wow, it's almost as if deviating from standards causes compatibility issues! How utterly unforeseeable!
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By joining the herd!
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It's not reasonable to blame Apple or Samsung here.
In Apple's case, it is reasonable to place at least some of the blame. It's not a widely supported format, to the point that I didn't even know it was a thing. That doesn't excuse my lack of knowledge, but it does show that even someone that follows technology could be unaware of the problem. That said, iOS 11 is 2.5 years old, and if what I read is accurate that is when they defaulted to HEIC. While I don't believe that Apple should have the right to dictate what is a widely accepted standard, it's market
Re:Yet... (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't even know it was a thing. That doesn't excuse my lack of knowledge, but it does show that even someone that follows technology could be unaware of the problem
I hadn't encountered it either. It's just not a thing. No web browser supports it, Irfanview only opens it if you install a codec from the Windows Store, even SmugMug (major photo hosting site, owner of Flickr) didn't support it until November last year.
Apple are welcome to use it on their phones, but blaming everybody else for using common standard image formats is what's unreasonable.
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I seriously doubt that they're actually saving enough space to be worth the hassle, I personally think they're only using it so that they can convince the rest of the world to pay their license fee. JPEG may be an old format but it's actually pretty good compression for images and storage is cheap now.
Probably a patent issue (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like HEIF/HEIC [wikipedia.org] is a patent-encrusted format. While it's free for non-commercial use, commercial use probably requires paying the patent holders for a license. If you're using a format which requires other companies license a patented format to be able to read them, then yes you absolutely should default to the industry-standard JPEG format. It is in fact unreasonable to assume everyone else should pay to license the format you're using. At least until enough companies adopt HEIF that it becomes a new industry standard (as is the case with h.264).
Absolutely. Crashing instead of throwing an error message for an unrecognized image format is just inept programming. The first few bytes of each image file tells you the format. Only an incompetent programmer doesn't check those bytes to confirm it's a file format they can handle.
Re: Probably a patent issue (Score:2)
If you take that attitude thereâ(TM)d never be any progress. Itâ(TM)s a chicken and egg situation, and somebody has moved first. Itâ(TM)s clearly here to stay, so deal with it.
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If you take that attitude thereâ(TM)d never be any progress. Itâ(TM)s a chicken and egg situation, and somebody has moved first. Itâ(TM)s clearly here to stay, so deal with it.
It's here to stay, but only on Apple devices. Just like Swift, the only people who knowingly choose it would be Apple fans.
Re: Probably a patent issue (Score:2)
Furthermore. AVC (H.264) is a bad example because it is also a âoepatent-encrustedâ format with MPEG-LA fees associated it with. All âoeindustry standardâ video formats are like this. Even AOMâ(TM)s promise to avoid this with AV1 looks like it is failing because a patent troll is lining licensing fees.
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It is indeed patented. That's the reason Apple is about the only company to support it. Everyone else either stuck with the quite-dated legacy formats like JPEG, or sided with Google and their WebP format.
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Did they not read those instructions?
No.
Having supervised a whole lot of online exams (not AP) over the past 3 weeks I will tell you that approximately 15-20% of every class did not follow instructions or did not remember them until the end.
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Follow Directions (Score:3, Funny)
Kids, of course, are hardwired to do the exact opposite of following directions so this becomes the most difficult or test prep. If a student feels their right to use their phone are being oppressed by the fascists who want the file delivered as PNG, they will use their phone and then get their teachers or parent to threaten to sue.
It is my understanding that the directions, in this case, were clear. I look forward to the /. story about the kid who was not hired because they submitted a resume in pastels and their parents are now on the way to the firm to cry about it.
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Well designed tests measure what they're supposed to measure.
If the ability to follow picayune directions is not what you want to measure, then your test should not depend on following picayune directions.
Nobody in real life gives a fuck about the ability to follow picayune directions. That includes the students and the universities who are relying on the results of these tests.
Therefore the tests are defective and should not be used.
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A huge part of the AP test, like any test, is to follow directions. Test prep includes teaching the directions, both explicitly and implicit. For example, the readers who grade the AP Calculus are trained to look for certain things, and in test prep those things are part of the direction. In Physics it is more so.
Kids, of course, are hardwired to do the exact opposite of following directions so this becomes the most difficult or test prep. If a student feels their right to use their phone are being oppressed by the fascists who want the file delivered as PNG, they will use their phone and then get their teachers or parent to threaten to sue.
It is my understanding that the directions, in this case, were clear. I look forward to the /. story about the kid who was not hired because they submitted a resume in pastels and their parents are now on the way to the firm to cry about it.
I guess they never had a test which started with "Read all the instructions" the first said, "enter your name".
The second instruction was "Hand in your test you are done"
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Instructions were peovided after testing was done. Not unlike the AP exams themselves...
Don't use funky formats in critical applications (Score:4, Insightful)
Resumes, tax returns, thesis, exam papers... stick to the most ubiquitous, best supported file formats.
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Now explain to them what file formats are.
Shouldn't anybody dumb enough... (Score:3, Insightful)
... to fail to submit in one of the required image formats just fail?
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Why should non-tech people have to think about the concept of an "image format"?
Re:Shouldn't anybody dumb enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... to fail to submit in one of the required image formats just fail?
I'm not sure about you but my phone has never asked me what "image format" to export or upload images in. You have a point on a PC where every file has some extension that may define it now that windows stopped defaulting to hiding the format, but the phone is very much the Windows XP of file format stupidity.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what format anyone's phone is capturing. I'll wager that 99.9% of those formats are determined by the vendor defaults.
I just checked, my camera doesn't even give me
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* HEIC * (Score:2)
usually means you've drank too much
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They drive like they're drunk, too.
CB screwed up again (Score:2)
Most every site out there that expects uploads states clearly on the upload screen which file formats will work and gives a direct message to the user if they try outside what works. Yet they failed to do that.
Yes, you fail your computer science examination... (Score:2)
Same shit, different smell.. (Score:2)
For my work coworkers sometimes have to snap pics of the products we work with (I work remotely), and if they have an iPhone it'll default to HEIC, which is what they end up emailing over or uploading to our shared Google drive..
The system is far from flawless when it comes to Apple claiming they convert it when it leaves their ecosystem. My older version of Photoshop doesn't recognize them either on my PC. Such a headache, and for what?
Another recent annoying thing is websites using the WEBP format - Shopi
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WebP is slowly becoming popular because it's got no (known) patent issues, and the reference implementation is BSD-licensed. Transitioning to a new format is always awkward, but it also needs to be done. The current common formats - JPEG for lossy, PNG for lossless - are old. Really old. Their compression is dated - far less sophisticated than that used in WebP. Using WebP means smaler files, and thus faster-loading sites and lower hosting costs.
I've even seen the format crop up in pirated comic book files
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Transitioning to a new format is always awkward, but it also needs to be done.
Sometimes things are just good enough. JPEG and PNG are those things in the image space, ZIP is the same in the archive space, in fact ZIP is so widely used many other "formats" are secretly just ZIP with a different file extension.
Somehow your "it also needs to be done" turns out to be complete bullshit! A
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Old isn't a problem. Inefficient is. PNG's a really good format, certainly - but take a PNG image, turn it into lossless WebP, and it will always get smaller. Significantly smaller, just because the compression is more advanced, out-performing even a PNG optimised with zopfli compression. WebP lossy mode also outperforms JPEG, though the performance difference is less impressive there. We have a lot of people using sites via mobile devices now - size matters, just as it did during the days of dialup.
I did a
Work to specification (Score:2, Insightful)
It's one important skill you have to learn at college. Deliver what you're supposed to deliver in a way the customer wants. If you cannot do that, you fail.
Looks to me like "working as designed, no bug, ticket closed".
Not Very Advanced Students (Score:2)
Do these things not have a "save as" option, or is that too complicated for an advanced placement.
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Do these things not have a "save as" option, or is that too complicated for an advanced placement.
Hey mister smarty pants. Please send me a screenshot of your *phone* ever producing a "save as" dialogue. Bonus points if you can chose HEIC as the saving method.
Good life lesson (Score:2, Insightful)
If your employee wants jpeg, you send jpeg. No buts.
Absolutely unacceptable response! (Score:2)
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How many people sit a high-school test using their phones?
Most will be using PCs or laptops. I assume the 1% who could not submit were using iPads, which are very popular in education. Costs a bit more than a Chromebook, but hardly elite.
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Many people these days don't even have PCs or laptops, they do everything on their phone. I can't imagine why, given how cheap a PC is, but they seem to think it's simpler to only use one device even that device has a tiny screen.
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Did you not even read the summary? This same problem also affects some newer Android devices.
”But the testing portal doesn't support the default format on iOS devices and some newer Android phones, HEIC files.“
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Well, no. Samsung. It has nothing to do with "Android."
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Aren't IOS devices the choice of the one percent, with poorer households opting for cheaper, more economical Android devices?
In America, about 45% of smartphones are iPhones.
You can buy a used but fully functional unlocked iPhone for under $100.
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You can buy a used but fully functional unlocked iPhone for under $100.
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I can only say anecdotally, but from a few conversations I've overheard at a secondary school in the UK, it's socially advantagious to own an iPhone. It's a status symbol. It tells your peers "I am rich enough to buy an iPhone." Owning an android means people will think you are poor.
Re:These are some pretty stupid college students (Score:4, Insightful)
I concur. This isn't 30 years ago when you can just handwrite everything. Welcome to the world kids. If you want to be successful, you need to understand how to use technology. At bare minimum you need to be able to read directions and google errors.
These courses are to get out of college courses. If you can't run tech well enough to do that, I think the test is doing what it's designed to do.
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Technology is proceeding to get more and more abusive toward the user. Hidden modes of interaction (like requiring you to manually disable your network adapters to do an offline installation), cloud everything that spies on you, every application out there seems to omit screenshots of their actual user interface from their marketing, testing before release is non-existent (the users will report bugs, right?), and a million other complaints.,
Technology, as handed down to us by the corporate overlords has bec
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Proprietary software has always been hostile to the users.
Maybe you just noticed more recently?
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This is a trend in open source too. Firefox is the poster child.
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I consider myself pretty decent with computers. Been using PCs since the days of Windows 3.1.
This, however, was on a phone. I am not even sure how to bring up a file directory on my phone, let alone how to start changing file types of the images taken with its camera, and I most definitely wouldn't have time to learn with minutes left on the clock to turn in my exam papers!
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It depends how the test is proctored. If googling is forbidden (as perhaps it should be), it's difficult to find answers such as
iPhone's HEIC Format Causing Some Students to Fail AP Exams, Here's How to Fix It [macrumors.com]
Re:These are some pretty stupid college students (Score:5, Informative)
If you read TFA you'd see that the problem was that "The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner's time ran out."
Maybe if the site returned immediately with 'Unsupported image format, please re-submit as a .jpg or .png', you might have an argument. But when the site locked up and didn't allow you to do anything else then you don't know that you did something wrong so you can fix it vs the site is not responding and this is out of your control.
Two years ago I was tasked with building a mobile app that allowed uploading images from your camera roll. Worked fine on my old iPhone 5S which was uploading .jpg. Released to the client to test, and immediately got complaints that they were getting errors when trying to upload some images. .heic files, and added in support for it.
But guess what? Instead of just locking up and timing out or crashing the app, my backend realised that it didn't understand the image format, and returned an error immediately. And I could then look at the server logs to see what was causing the error, realised that they were uploading
Everyone here is blaming the students who are already under stress due to writing, and now being unable to submit, an exam. Very few are rightly blaming the developers of the system for:
a) not testing the very common use case of using an iphone to upload your pictures
b) not handling what should be an expected failure case of users uploading unsupported formats and instead of returning an error, locking up and timing out the test
Lots of those students would have been able to convert their images to .jpg or .png if they knew that there was a problem with the image format in the first place. And before the inevitable 'students should read the instructions before taking the test' nonsense responses that are already filling up this article, consider:
"One senior, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid repercussions from school, said that the College Boardâ(TM)s tweet went out just a few minutes before his Physics C test began"
and
"The College Boardâ(TM)s tweet went out just a few hours before Spencerâ(TM)s scheduled exam; he doesnâ(TM)t have a Twitter account and didnâ(TM)t see it."
Information like this should not be sent out over a damn tweet. It should be in big bold red text as part of the instructions before starting the test.
The college board is 100% to blame for this, and those of you who are blaming kids for their mistake, having years or decades of hindsight and experience in the IT field, should be ashamed of yourselves.
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No, but very few jobs don't require basic IT competence. Shit, find me a college degree that doesn't require it.
You don't have to know anything about IT or be a geek to use a fucking web browser to search online for "how do I convert this image into one that the person I'm sending it to can actually fucking read".
You just have to not be a moron.
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>Open image editor >Save as PNG Oh wow, so fucking difficult. Maybe apple snowflakes will learn that special snowflake formats are a bad thing.
No technical 3rd party applications necessary.
Open photos application.
Click on photo.
Select "Export" from menu.
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So the article is a non-issue and a result of snowflake entitlement.
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Yes, that's great. But when the instruction to ensure you're not uploading heic images goes out minutes before your exam starts over a tweet, you're probably going to miss it. Who the hell expects kids to be sitting on twitter minutes before they write an exam?
And for the great majority of those students who missed the tweet and submitted an heic, the site locked up until their time ran out, so they didn't have a chance to realise that they needed to convert their images to another format.
Maybe the special
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Charge Apple for the retest time. They're the idiots who decided to just do whatever the fuck they wanted instead of either following established standards or putting in the work to change them without fucking over users.
A properly programmed website doesn't just lockup when encountering unknown data formats - no, this fuckup is squarely on the site administrators.
Besides, TFA states some newer Android devices also use this format. So you gonna go to Sundar Pichai's front door and bitch at him too?
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Besides, TFA states some newer Android devices also use this format.
They can use it, but they don't unless the owner digs into the settings and forces the phone to send it out.
Re:If they can't figure out that only certain... (Score:5, Insightful)
...image formats are supported they may very well not be college material.
Given that they were presented with no reason their submission failed, and given that phones don't typically ask you what format you want to capture the image in could it be that you're sitting on top of a very high horse?
Re: (Score:2)
Given that they were presented with no reason their submission failed, and given that phones don't typically ask you what format you want to capture the image in could it be that you're sitting on top of a very high horse?
The fact that iPhones default to using an image format that is equally as obscure as a RealPlayer image format.... IS OF CONSIDERABLE RELEVANCE TO THE DISCUSSION.
The fact that the students were UNAWARE that their shiny new iphone produced obscure data that isnt even close to widely supported is equal to a windows user using RealPlayer...
Using shitty software is not an excuse. Being unaware is not an excuse.
Surely you arent arguing that the C64 Doodle! user would be blameless.
Go on. Tell everyone th