
Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images - danso
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iphone-photos-glitch-email-college-board-jpeg-heic
======
braythwayt
A lot of comments are arguing about whether the software should have been
modified to accept the HEIC format.

Let's go with "no" for the sake of argument. They probably can't accept an mp3
of me singing my answers, either. But!

If I upload an HEIC, an mp3, a keynote file, or anything else unacceptable...
_Why doesn 't the site provide an immediate "File format not accepted, please
upload .gif, .jpg, or .png" message?_

According to the article, the software would actually just hang. I think
there's room to argue about whether they need to support the default format of
an extremely significant platform for students. I think there's room to argue
whether they should know enough about INPUT tags to let the browser help with
this.

But while we're arguing about those questions, can't we all agree that simply
hanging without providing a useful error message, and without giving the
student an opportunity to re-upload their image... Is unacceptably poor
software design for an institution that holds people's future in their hands?

I don't know about you, but if I were an American college student, I'd now be
wondering what else they have kind of slapped together without thinking
through graceful error handling?

~~~
treesprite82
It does have pretty much exactly that message. The corruption problems came
from students seeing that only PNGs/JPGs were allowed, then trying to
"convert" the file just by renaming it.

What they're doing is the same as 99% of other sites that expect images. _But_
it's probably fair to expect it to be even more streamlined (i.e: clear
conversion instructions) given the circumstances of a time-limited exam.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
No, what 99% of sites are doing is

    
    
        <input type="file" accept="image/png, image/jpg, image/jpeg" />
    

If you do that, Safari will convert the HEIC image to a JPEG automatically
when you try to upload it.

What they did instead was to poorly reinvent the accept header in Javascript
as follows:

    
    
        <input
          type="file"
          ...
          onChange={async e => {
            const split = file.name.split('.')
            const fileType = split[split.length-1].toLowerCase()
            const isAllowedExtension = extensions.includes(`.${fileType}`)
          }}
        />

(per
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261598)).

~~~
askvictor
That might be part of the problem, though other comments also point out that
students were copying file to a computer, then changing file extension, then
uploading. Possibly this was as a result of the iOS browser rejecting the file
in the first place due to the shoddy input filtering mentioned.

But going a bit bigger picture, the problem is that we still use file
extensions to denote file type.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
This keeps getting brought up because there was one anecdote in the Verge
story about a student who renamed the file on their computer. (Which still
shouldn't have caused the test to keel over, but it's at least slightly more
understandable.)

However, there were many other reports of students going the more "normal"
route of just uploading through their iPhones, which caused the website to
outright hang.

------
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.

~~~
lone_haxx0r
Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3],
so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default.

[1]
[https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036](https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923)

[2]
[http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEIC-
Yeah.html)

~~~
azinman2
First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file
formats in the <input> tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would
simply convert to one of the accepted formats.

It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in
terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that
were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they
could purchase to do that for them. This isn't an open-source endeavor, and
they charge each student to take the exam.

~~~
tedunangst
Wait. There's a way to get safari to upload HEIF _without_ conversion? All my
photos, which are HEIF on my phone, turn into jpeg when I upload them. I've
been trying to get the original HEIF off for months.

~~~
voisin
Dropbox and OneDrive allow you to sync HEIF instead of JPEG.

~~~
m0dest
Only native apps that explicitly opt-in to HEIC support.

------
coffeefirst
"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 this coming.

~~~
xienyc
>"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 to take pictures as JPEGs.

I agree with the people blaming the board for not having a standard image
input field that lets the OS know when to convert images to JPEG but that is
their only fault and I wouldn't have thought of that as a bug deal if not for
this issue. While I'm all for open source media formats replacing what we
have, HEIC certainly isn't big enough to be considered as among standard input
options. Also, isn't Apple themselves infamous for not supporting certain
formats throughout their devices?

~~~
pwthornton
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 is not sending people
workaround emails.

The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test
about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image
format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work.

This is a failure. An abysmal failure.

~~~
sh-run
ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours
to hack together an interim solution.

~~~
Rebelgecko
IIRC, you have to use special flags when you compile from source to get HEIC
support. And just because it's _available_ doesn't mean you can legally use
it. For example, the HEIF container's reference implementation is pretty
explicit about not allowing commercial use [0]. The MPEG consortium lists over
7000 patents on their webpage for HEIC[1]. Making sure that you're bit
infringing on those patents and/or working out a license deal with the patent
cartel is a nontrivial amount of work.

[0]:
[https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT](https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT)

[1]: [https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-
att1.pdf](https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf)

------
crazygringo
I thought iOS was supposed to convert HEIC images to JPEG automatically
behind-the-scenes in any file transfer situation where HEIC isn't supported.
The article itself even says:

> _iPhones convert HEICs to JPEGs automatically when they’re attached to
> emails in the Mail app_

I'm just curious technically why the same didn't happen with the testing
portal? If you have a webpage that accepts image uploads, is iOS Safari not
smart enough to do the same conversion?

Or was the portal programmed badly or in a non-standard way that that couldn't
happen? Or is there a way to do it that the developers ignored?

Just curious for the technical details of who's more to blame here -- Apple
not providing enough backwards compatibility, or the testing portal being
designed poorly.

Because blaming students for not following obscure instructions to change
their phone's overall configuration is not the right path. A national testing
portal ought to support the default image format taken by the world's most
popular phone, period.

~~~
oefrha
Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute

    
    
      <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg,image/png" />
    

Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was
automatically converted to JPEG.

Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and
standard filtering.

Edit: Like a sibling comment said, the accept attribute actually isn't
necessary; even PNG images (e.g. screenshots) from Photos are converted to
JPEG automatically. This is true on both macOS and iOS Safari (latest). To be
clear, on macOS you need to select from Photos instead of the filesystem for
this to take effect.

In case anyone's interested, source code you can use to test for yourself (a
Flask app):

app.py:

    
    
      import flask
      
      
      app = flask.Flask(__name__)
      
      
      @app.route("/", methods=["GET", "POST"])
      def index():
          if flask.request.method == "POST":
              image = flask.request.files["image"]
              return f"uploaded {image.filename!r} ({image.mimetype})"
          return flask.render_template("index.html")
    

templates/index.html:

    
    
      <html>
        <head>
          <meta charset="utf-8" />
          <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
        </head>
        <body>
          <form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
            <input name="image" type="file" required />
            <input type="submit" />
          </form>
        </body>
      </html>

~~~
dragontamer
> Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and
> standard filtering.

Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead
of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC
was not specified?

HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should
default to JPEG in this case.

~~~
bjtitus
The comment was edited to show that iOS does in fact do this.

But even if it did send HEIC, if you're going to fail to handle "any" format,
then you better specify the one you can handle. By the same token, why
shouldn't my computer convert every .docx to PDF, or some other "more
universal" format?

Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time
sending out tweets and writing help docs.

~~~
derefr
> Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their
> time sending out tweets and writing help docs.

Point of order: separate people, with separate/independent/concurrent job
responsibilities. It very likely wasn't the _programmers_ tweeting and writing
docs. (Heck, I expect that the College Board doesn't even retain any full-time
programmers, only contracts with firms for projects.)

~~~
braythwayt
Separate people, yes, and we should not blame the people sending out the
tweets. But we can hold the organziation they belong to responsible.

It's the same as if Apple shipped me an empty box instead of my iPad Pro. Of
course I can't blame the customer support person who takes my call, and I
shouldn't be rude to them. But I would still blame Apple the corporation for
such a thing, had it happened.

------
Hokusai
> 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 depend on software, education depends on software,
lives depend on software ... but we treat software as a toy where a new fancy
image format is a reasonable change to make because our platform gets a little
more fancy and for sure a little less compatible to lock-in users.

I am all for regulation, and it is coming, as the software industry has shown
to be an immature risk-taking mess. But, it can be a more bearable amount of
regulation if we exercise some level of self-constraint on how we break each
new release of software.

If we keep blaming traditional business (education, accounting, grocery
stores, etc.) for not "updating fast enough" to new trends, they are going to
justly react to our demands on their thin margin profits and ask the
government to stop us. When you do not know if your business will survive
another month, to have to invest non-stop in new software without any tangible
benefit is an unreasonable demand.

Software has become too important the past twenty years. It is time that as a
industry we realize that and act accordingly.

~~~
cm2187
Plus the backend doesn't move fast. The .net framework only got a json
serializer recently. I am not holding my breath for system.drawing to handle
HEIC!

~~~
MattGaiser
> The .net framework only got a json serializer recently.

What do you mean by recently? I am not a .net user, but this seems quite
basic.

~~~
foepys
Early when JSON was new, people were using the JavaScript parser included in
.NET to get the values. Then Microsoft build a small JSON parser for their
ASP.NET library. But then James Newton-King build JSON.NET and Microsoft
eventually switched a lot of their libraries over to it because it was just
very good. It could do a lot of stuff very fast with a nice API.

Last year Microsoft introduced a new and more efficient way to allocate memory
natively into .NET Core 2.0 (Span<T>). Since JSON.NET is still used by .NET
Framework that doesn't support the new API, Microsoft created System.Text.Json
that includes a new JSON parser that utilizes it. The first Microsoft project
to use the new parser by default was ASP.NET Core 3.0.

------
_bxg1
This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems,
facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their
users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software
systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative
of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL
systems underpinning the US gov) had been made reliable over the years through
sheer brute force as opposed to principled engineering. But in the latter
case, as we saw with New Jersey's unemployment system, that "reliability" was
fragile and contingent on the current state of affairs, and had no hope of
withstanding a sudden shift in usage patterns.

Now we have various organizations - governmental and otherwise - hastily
setting up online versions of essential services and it seems like every
single one of them breaks on arrival.

We need some sort of standard for software engineering quality. I don't think
this is an academic question anymore. Real people's lives are being impacted
every day now by shoddy software, and with the current crisis they often have
no alternative. Software that you or I could probably have executed better,
but that the people who were hired to do it either a) couldn't, or b) didn't
bother. It's nearly impossible for non-technical decision makers in these orgs
to evaluate the quality of the systems they've hired people to build. We need
quality assurance at an institutional level.

If not governmental, maybe an organization around this could be made by
developers themselves. Not the "certified for $technology" certifications we
have now, but a certification of fundamental software engineering skills and
principles. A certification you can lose if you do something colossally
irresponsible. At the end of the day, this dilution of quality is having a
negative impact on our job field, so it concerns all of us. It leads to
technical debt, micro-management, excessively rigid deadlines and
requirements, which we all have to deal with. All of these are either symptoms
of or coping mechanisms for management's inability to evaluate engineering
quality.

~~~
karatestomp
We keep making a bunch of products where protocols and existing software would
do just fine, while hitting fewer edge cases.

Know what would be better than the ten goddamn apps and the iPad and shit
they're using for our kid's school? Mailed (or emailed) worksheet packets with
guidance, recorded lessons on Youtube. Mail back the worksheets, have the
food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the school every
week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a phone and email them. Or they could
just give each kid workbooks and textbooks like they did when I was in school
but that's out of fashion now for no reason. _eyeroll_

Several logins to manage. Apps that erase your work if you hit the wrong
thing. Weird interfaces. Jank galore. Just use the fucking basics. You don't
need a custom app for every single thing. Email exists. Use it.

~~~
jimhefferon
> Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up,
> drop them off at the school every week or so, or just do photos-to-PDF on a
> phone and email them. Or they could just give each kid workbooks and
> textbooks like they did when I was in school but that's out of fashion now
> for no reason. eyeroll

I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is much
more complicated than _eyeroll_ suggests.

For one thing, teachers would not accept physical papers in the present state
of the disease. Even if a district says papers are OK after they have sat for
three days (or whatever), that means that (1) they get picked up delivered to
some repository (2) they would sit there for days (3) the teachers come and
get them (delivering to the teachers would mean more decontamination time) (4)
they take a day or two to grade. So assignments on Monday might be ready the
following Monday? Then the teacher writes an email, "John you did the wrong
page. Please resubmit." It is just not workable. (On my assignments there was
something like a 10% confusion rate, for instance where someone did 1-10 odd
instead of 1-10. I sympathise. It is a confusing time.)

I did photos to PDF. After two or three weeks of back and forth with my
students we got so that most of them would reliably send legible one-PDF-per-
assignments. Again, life is more complicated than, "Any moron can do this."

Finally, email is not a panacea. Having a hundred students emailing their
assignments is an invitation for disaster. I was able to go through the
college's system (we use Canvas) so it kept track of who sent what and when
they sent it. As this article points out any large system has issues, but
these systems exist for a reason. I and my students had issues and just had to
work around them. With patience and good will we figured it out.

That's what happens a lot in education. People have all kinds of life
situations, there are all kinds of tech and comfort with tech, etc. It is
complicated.

Folks who are not teachers but are interested in some of the issues could
check out the last dozen or so epsidoes of Mr Barton's Maths Podcast
[http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/](http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast/)
which are about teaching from home for primary and secondary teachers. Really
good stuff.

~~~
karatestomp
> I'm a college teacher and my wife is a high school teacher. Education is
> much more complicated than eyeroll suggests.

Wife's a middle school teacher and ~40-50% of the other people in my social
circle (not via her & her colleagues, oddly enough) are teachers, too. What
they've done here (this state, post NCLB) is get rid of comprehensive
curriculums with prepared material (workbooks, sheet packets, textbooks) and
now districts and teachers all come up with this stuff themselves, which is
clearly wasteful—why have a committee at the state-level do this once when
every goddamn district can hire a couple new people to handle curriculum and
rope teachers into those same committees, because they don't already have so
many friggin' meetings they're starting to overlap?—so yes, _hard_ eyeroll at
the trend away from textbook + workbook as a foundation for (middle grade and
lower, at least) classes. The state could have made their _own_ such resources
several times over for the waste the current system has produced, if they
didn't trust a company to provide it (as was usually the case in the past).
The whiplash-inducing pointless policy shifts in education, usually
implemented by what _sure appear to be given their observed behavior_
certifiable morons, is tiresome and harmful to educators and families alike
(we have both perspectives).

Now there are CDC suggestions that kids should have their own resources next
year, but gee, we just switched away from textbooks + workbooks, which would
have been great, to a mess of shared "learning centers" and junk like that (oh
and got rid of all the indoor-recess toys in the kindergarten classrooms
statewide to make room for those). It's _pure_ fad-chasing, well-intentioned
at best and the school admin version of résumé-driven-development at worst
(and it's often the latter). When they accidentally stumble on an idea that
might be good they fail to implement it correctly (i.e. they can't even follow
simple directions or understand how games or human systems work, these highly-
paid jokes of PhDs that run the schools). Very frustrating.

Maybe your schools are doing a better job than ours but there's _no possible
way_ the tech support load & assignment screw-up rate here isn't a bigger
hassle here than if it were on regular ol' paper, including the effort of
shuffling that around and disinfecting it, and I think they've actually done a
decent job given the tools they're being told to use (webshit and apps) and
the time they had to prepare. Hell they could probably buy some kind of UV
disinfectant chamber for submitted papers for what they spend on all these
stupid apps every year, stick a drop-box just inside the door of the meal-
delivery schoolbuses and outside the school, and call it good.

What I know for sure: the only part of this where it felt like my kid was
almost getting the kind of education they would in the classroom without a ton
of extra effort on our parts, and it felt like we understood what they needed
and what needed to be done about 100% of the time, was the first couple weeks
when we _did_ have organized packets of paper instructions and assignments
they sent home before spring break just in case there were closures (they
didn't yet know it'd be _the whole rest of the school year_ , of course). And
with the paper we didn't have to deal with "this login isn't working" and "I
hit the wrong thing and now my work I just did is gone" and "what the fuck,
_I_ , the adult and a software professional, can't even find this thing they
say is at the other end of this link (or where in the app this thing is
supposed to be, or whatever)", and so on, and so on.

That's for the younger kids. For the older ones, drop-off rates have been...
high. Many of those kids weren't even attempting the majority of assigned
work, if they were doing any of it, by a week or two into this. Very high
levels of effort by some teachers had noticeable but still low effects on
keeping kids engaged. We're talking north of half the kids in my wife's school
essentially just skipping 4th quarter this year, and a good chunk of the rest
getting maybe 10% as much out of it as they would have in school—it's that
bad. I think some assignments missed due to logistics or scanning errors or
whatever are nothing next to those effects.

------
snazz
Here's the relevant frontend source code for the file upload picker, if
anyone's wondering (webpack://src/components/exam/submissions/FileInput.js):

    
    
      <input
                type="file"
                ref={inputRef}
                name="fileupload"
                disabled={disabled}
                accept={EXTENSIONS[type]}
                data-cb-element="no-cb"
                onChange={async e => {
                  const [file] = Object.keys(e.target.files).map(key => e.target.files[key])
                  const fileSizeInMb = file.size/(CONVERSION_BASE*CONVERSION_BASE)
                  const fileSizeInKb = file.size/CONVERSION_BASE
                  const split = file.name.split('.')
                  const fileType = split[split.length-1].toLowerCase()
                  const extensions = EXTENSIONS[type].split(', ')
                  const isAllowedExtension = extensions.includes(`.${fileType}`)
                  const alreadyExists = files.find(f => f.name === file.name && f.size === file.size && f.lastModified === file.lastModified)
                  let error
    
                  if (alreadyExists)
                    error = { title: 'You have already uploaded a file with the same name.', details: 'Please attach a different file.' }
                  else if (!isAllowedExtension)
                    error = { title: 'This file type is not acceptable.', details: 'Please check the requirements, save your file in one of the accepted formats, and resubmit.' }
                  else if (fileSizeInKb <= minSize)
                    error = { title: 'Your file is too small.', details: 'Please check the file-size requirements, save a larger version, and resubmit.' }
                  else if (fileSizeInMb > maxSize)
                    error = { title: 'Your file is too big.', details: 'Please check the file-size requirements, save a smaller version, and resubmit. ' }
                
                  if (error)
                    await setError(<><strong>{error.title}</strong> {error.details}</>)
                  else {
                    await updateFiles(file)
                    setError(null)
                  }
    
                  inputRef.current.value = null
                }}
              />
    

The EXTENSIONS variable is defined here:

    
    
      export const EXTENSIONS = {
        [TYPE_DOC]: '.txt, .doc, .docx, .pdf, .odt',
        [TYPE_PHOTO]: '.png, .jpg, .jpeg',
        [TYPE_AUDIO]: '.m4a, .mp3, .wav, .ogg'
      }

~~~
machello13
So do we know yet why iOS wasn't auto-converting the HEIC images? Is it
because they didn't use mime types in the `accept` attribute?

~~~
snazz
That's my guess, looking at how they made the accept attribute.

~~~
scott_s
I wondered that, too, but when I googled around for how to do that properly, I
didn't see anything saying it matters.

------
vaidhy
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: <quote> 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 be
converted to an accepted file format. Here are two ways students can do that:
Update their Apple device settings before the exam so that their photos will
be saved as .jpeg files: Settings > Camera > Formats > Select “Most
Compatible” OR Resave the HEIC file as an accepted file format: the easiest
way to convert an HEIC file is for students to email it to themselves using
the iPhone or iPad Mail app. The attached image will automatically be
converted to a JPEG. </quote>

I guess we think it is too hard for an AP student to actually read and follow
instructions.

~~~
kleiba
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 formats. But then again, let's not forget that today's students are
"digital natives", so I assume they both now about JPEG and PNG and also about
their phones.

However, if I now hear that this point was _explicitly addressed_ in relevant
FAQ's, all of the above really becomes irrelevant in my opinion, because it
really doesn't leave much in terms of excuses.

At college, every test came with certain rules. _For this exam, you 're
allowed to use any auxiliaries except computers._ And stuff like that. _You
must write in permanent ink._ etc. _Images must be in one of the following
format: ..._ IMO is just along the same lines.

There is an old principle in jurisdiction: _ignorantia juris non excusat_ \-
basically stating that it's your responsibility to know the rules.

~~~
mattkrause
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.

~~~
kleiba
If the system accepted the files, then what was the problem?

~~~
mattkrause
Per the article, the "demo" test accepted it, but the actual exam did not.

Perhaps the demo did something dumb, like check the file extension but not
whether the file could actually be opened.

~~~
kleiba
In that case I completely agree. If the demo was there specifically to test
technical setups, then it should not behave differently from the exam system.
In particular, such a test system should be compliant to what is expressed in
the FAQ.

------
II2II
While it sounds like the College Board may be at fault for some of the issues,
like the test timing out when HEIC images were sent or the initial
communication of the issue, I wouldn't be so quick to place all of the blame
on them. Part of the problem is how we more-or-less glorify an ignorance of
technology. This can be seen in both students trying to change the file type
by changing the file extension and JPEG being referred to as a "most
compatible" rather than by name in the settings.

EDIT: the comment about "most compatible" was based upon information from the
article, rather than access to an iPhone. I have since looked it up, and JPEG
is mentioned underneat the option.

I am saying this because people need to have a degree of understanding of
technology in order to have some control over it, even though I recognize that
some people will construe such statements as being elitist. That depth of
knowledge does not even have to be particularly deep. In this case,
understanding that photos may be represented in different ways by the computer
and that you have to ensure that the recipient can accept that representation
is important. After all, this is not the only case where they will run into
this issue. It is a big part of the reason why businesses settle upon some
form of standard for the exchange of data, may that be through common business
practices or a standardization body.

~~~
xienyc
Ironically the person from the article who attempted converting the HEIC files
to JPG by renaming them was taking a Computer Science test.

~~~
ativzzz
Computer literacy is not one of the topics covered by high school computer
science.

------
IvanK_net
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 to have in the past with phone chargers).

~~~
whalesalad
Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?

~~~
IvanK_net
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.

~~~
gbear605
But that isn’t true about HEIC. There isn’t a license fee.

~~~
pornel
HEIC is based on H.265, so there is a whole separate organization dedicated
licensing and litigating its patents.

~~~
gbear605
No? It’s an ISO standard that’s separate from H.265. Maybe you’re thinking of
HEVC, which is like that. (Alternatively I’m wrong, which is totally possible)

~~~
nshepperd
HEIC is defined as HEVC in a HEIF container. So yes, it's patent encumbered.

Edit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format#HEIC:_HEVC_in_HEIF)

~~~
gbear605
I learned something today, thanks :)

------
mywittyname
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 heard of HEIC, and I'm
sure I'm not the only one.

Apple should default to sending a jpeg in situations where it cannot confirm
support of newer formats. Maybe this means jpegs remain the default
interchange format indefinitely, but so what? They are Good Enough for most
cases.

~~~
markkanof
Agreed. My company builds text messaging tools and we recently had to add
support for HEIC images. Not a huge deal, but we only had to do it at all
because we started seeing a few errors with users messages where a HEIC image
was being sent in from an iPhone and we didn't have support for that format.
It turns out that iOS will send a JPEG when sending an MMS message to avoid
this compatibility issue. Except, in the cases where iOS doesn't send the JPEG
and instead sends the HEIC. I'm not entirely sure what causes this but it
seems to happen occasionally.

------
chucksmash
Failing a test because the upload used the wrong image format is the 2020
version of failing a test because you used the wrong type of pencil to fill in
the Scantron bubbles.

------
winter_blue
Someone at the College Board just needs to write a few lines of code to
convert HEIC images to JPEG, instead of forcing thousands (if not more)
students to retake the test.

On Ubuntu, you can:

    
    
            sudo apt-get install libheif-examples
            heif-convert infile.heif outfile.jpg
    

Based on the article, it sounds like the College Board did actually receive
the test files from these students. The students were emailed that the files
were "corrupted". So in all honesty, this is just a matter of them actually
just converting the files they've received then (or using an image viewer that
can handled HEIC.)

~~~
bscphil
It seems pretty clear that there are at least some cases in which the test was
dropped / failed entirely because of the issue, including the case that The
Verge leads with:

> Nick Bryner, a high school senior in Los Angeles, had just completed his AP
> English Literature and Composition test last week. But when he snapped a
> photo of a written answer with his iPhone and attempted to upload it to the
> testing portal, it stopped responding.

> The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out.
> Bryner failed the test. He’s retaking it in a few weeks.

In this case it seems unlikely that the issue is correctable after the fact by
the College Board.

------
abakker
FWIW, if you airdrop files from phone to desktop, they come as HEIC, and it
isn't always easy to convert them once you've got an HEIC file in my
filesystem instead of my app.

------
cm2187
What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone in
their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it. It is a problematic
form of computer illiteracy.

~~~
vosper
> What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone
> in their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it

Why shouldn't that work? I think it would be pretty great if changing the file
extension popped up a helper that asked me if I wanted to convert from HEIC to
JPG?

Really, no-one should have to think about file formats when they're trying to
do something that has nothing intrinsically to do with file formats.

Seems more like a failure of software engineering, to me.

~~~
megiddo
Maybe for common formats, but that assumes the file was correctly named to
start with. It also assumes there's a trivial or reasonable conversion between
formats. What happens if I rename a CAD file to MP3?

The failure of engineering was clearly with the test authors - they should
have been validating their inputs.

~~~
vosper
> What happens if I rename a CAD file to MP3?

"This kind of file is for a [computer-aided design system]. It is not an [MP3
music] file and so it cannot be used by [music playing software]. Would you
still like to rename the file?"

------
sokoloff
> Due to the photo’s size, the conversion took over five minutes.

This seems unlikely. What is the largest possible size phone photo coupled
with the slowest reasonable Windows computer and Internet connection? There's
just not that much data or processing involved in converting a 12 megapixel
image.

------
Causality1
Frankly I think the root cause of this is making technology so obfuscated in
the name of making it easy that people are working with files who have no idea
what a file format is. It's as if someone who did paperwork all day couldn't
tell the difference between printer paper, construction paper, and plastic
transparencies because they only ever encountered them in the appropriate
contexts.

------
kassouni
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.

~~~
xvector
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!

------
jedberg
The irony here is that it is the most privileged students who will suffer this
the most. It's the ones with the fanciest phones that will run into this bug.
Usually these things go the other way -- usually it's the poorest who have to
deal with these kinds of things.

Edit: See the reply below about iPhone SEs using HEIC. A point that I missed.

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
Don't get so ahead of yourself. Even people in relative poverty, in many
cases, have new(er) iPhones, and HEIC is default on my SE, the budget iPhone
model from 2016. In high schools you're alienated if you don't have the "blue
bubbles"* - although it's stupid, if you're in high school in 2020 you
probably need an iPhone, and you can get older models for a relatively small
price (my SE was <$100). If anything, the ones with the most privilege will
have enough technical training to know to make their phones default to JPEG
rather than HEIC.

[1] - Source: I currently go to high school.

~~~
bscphil
> if you're in high school in 2020 you probably need an iPhone

Not disputing anything else in your comment, but where is this true? I go to
(and work at) a fairly prestigious university, and even here it's at best a
status symbol, not a "need" of any kind. One of my friends uses a flip phone.

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
It's a social thing - and a particularly stupid one. If you're ostracized by
your peers for having the "green bubble" you're not gonna have great luck
asking for the class notes or what Joey got on question 13. iMessage is the
messenger of choice for students who don't value privacy or portability.

------
polygot
_> Changing a file’s extension does not guarantee that it will be converted,
but Spencer was still able to submit the demo test with no problem._

In what situations does the file format auto convert when you change the
extension?

~~~
kristopolous
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.

~~~
Spivak
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.

~~~
kristopolous
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.

------
diebeforei485
Who doesn't test their upload forms with common flows like uploading an iPhone
photo?

Sounds to be like the college board contracted this out to the lowest bidder.

~~~
MattGaiser
The burden of testing is enormous and nobody wants to pay for it. I know
plenty of companies that barely test at all. All except the Googles of the
world miss stuff regularly.

~~~
cosmotic
Irony here is that College Board's core business is testing.

------
irrational
The thing I don't understand in all the news articles I have read about this
is the major complaint of the students seems to be that they have to retake
the test which will mean they have to study for a few more weeks. Isn't having
more time to study a good thing? Having more time to study and prepare should
mean less stress, not more.

~~~
karthikshan
If they didn't have to retake the test they would have 0 stress because they'd
be done, so you can't really claim there's less stress. Also many students
likely already crammed enough knowledge into their heads for when they took
the original test, and are now forced to retain all of this for multiple
weeks, i.e they have to put in a lot more effort studying for little to no
improvement in score (yes students cram for tests and don't retain
information, that's just how testing works)

------
rock_artist
This might sounds trivial. But proprietary codecs are hard for commercial
usage. They cost money. If it’s just uploading a file. Ok. But if the system
designed to decode it in any way this might lead to more expensive system.

The codec “war” and Apple’s decision going with HEIC over opened source WebP
is also to be questioned if portability of media is expected.

~~~
gbear605
HEIC isn’t a proprietary codec, it’s an ISO standard

~~~
pornel
But it's built on patented codec (H.265). It's illegal to use it without a
patent license, regardless whether it's a standard or not. Even if you wrote
your own implementation, it would be illegal for you to use your own code.

Technically HEIF is a good format — it's half the size of WebP. WebP is based
on a much weaker codec that is two generations older. AVIF is a freely-
licensed HEIF alternative.

~~~
gbear605
My understanding (based on
[http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEIC-
Yeah.html) ) is that HEIC is not built on patents while HEVC is, so HEVC is
problematic to use, but HEIC isn’t.

~~~
kuyaz
As it states in your source

> The HEIC holds the HEIF data that is compressed using HEVC by MPEG

Wrapping a HEVC file in a container does not automatically void any patents of
the contained file. Otherwise, anyone can shove any patent encumbered file
format in a ".zip" container (or any container/wrapper) and avoid any patent
or licensing issues.

------
tempestn
Ugh, as someone who took a number of AP exams back in the day, the idea of
completing the entire exam and then having to redo it weeks later because of
something like this is just painful. I think I agree with the sentiment that
these students should be allowed to re-submit their existing answers, despite
the obvious concern about cheating.

------
nmstoker
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 fast, why take the chance that your exam
efforts could be rejected based on a marker not being able to read your
writing. Add to that the ability to compose text far more easily when typing
and for those with a modest amount of practice the dramatically faster rate of
output and it seems really strange that everyone doesn't type them and they
just avoid this problem entirely.

~~~
ReverseCold
Some tests require symbols (like greek letters), which aren’t easy to type by
default. Also, people have been practicing all year by handwriting responses
(since we didn’t know it would be online, obviously) - so a handwritten option
is accommodating that.

~~~
snazz
Some of the exams (like biology) no longer require calculations this year--
instead of doing the calculation, you just explain how you would do it. This
has been confusing for a lot of students, but it solves the "special input
methods" problem.

~~~
j-james
Right, but Biology isn't the only AP exam that requires calculations. Dealing
with integrals for AP Calculus is much more of a pain.

------
rs23296008n1
This is no different to the College Board not accepting submissions from
people who arrived by the subway or rode their bicycle. Or perhaps, _used the
wrong colored pen_. Its at that level of absurdity.

Someone didn't bother doing basic testing. This is ironic because the system
itself is a test submission system.

Personally I'd be wanting a full inquiry into this.

But the blame is still squarely on the College Board. They are a organisation
that has actually failed in their core mission.

Apple etc shouldn't be the target of any anger. Some random website doesn't
support image uploads. Thats the issue. The website should be more resilient.
The College Board didn't do their homework. Perhaps they need to study harder
and be more diligent? Attention to detail has consequences.

------
tasogare
> The College Board is now allowing test-takers who have issues submitting
> their tests to email them instead

Crazy there wasn’t an email to reach out teachers before. Any exam I passed
with a computer or online component always had a way to contact the prof in
case something goes wrong.

------
NotSammyHagar
Wow, that would be incredibly devastating if you had to take it over again.
not everyone is able to devote weeks of their lives to these things.

------
hinkley
Here's a crazy idea: If your whole web site is based around a high stakes
interaction, especially with a time limit, _put a dress rehearsal into the
registration process_.

If someone wants to make an account to register for a test, ask them to upload
a picture of anything. A signature. The wall. Their face. A cat. Use the same
framework for finishing the test that you used for this interaction. So if for
instance you've broken the submit button on mobile Safari, that gets sorted
out before the Big Day.

~~~
SilasX
Some other comments [1] noted that they did -- they had a demo site, it was
just hobbled by not actually doing all the same things it would do on test
day. So students tested their method out, it looked right, and they repeated
it on the test day only to have it fail there.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261511)

~~~
hinkley
Yeah I noticed that too.

Murphy's Law I suppose. The spot at which you stop testing is the spot where
it will break. But do you learn not to listen to that voice in your head that
is telling you this part doesn't need to be tested?

------
turdnagel
Surprised no one here has mentioned the robustness principle yet.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)

The layman's version is: "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what
you accept."

------
ipsocannibal
This whole situation boils down to a lack of understanding of who the
software's users are and a lack of simulation of their use cases. This problem
becomes glaringly obvious if you perform user studies with a sample of test
takers with simulated tests. The College Board cheaped out by not doing their
do diligence to ensure that the system they vended worked as advertised. I'd
like to see if this was developed in house or outsourced. If outsourced I
think the College Board should sue. If not there should soon be several new
vacancies on their webdev team.

------
kyle-rb
> tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG. Changing a file’s
> extension does not guarantee that it will be converted, but Spencer was
> still able to submit the demo test with no problem.

This should really say that changing a file's extension will (almost) _never_
mean that the file is converted.

Anyway, it seems like today's students have missed out on the arcane knowledge
of renaming a jpg/mp3/whatever to .docx, submitting it, pretending that it got
mysteriously corrupted, and getting an extension until whenever the professor
realizes the issue. (I've never done it, but I've heard legend.)

------
APtemp9372
I took an English AP test yesterday. They give you three options for
submitting your essay: Upload a picture, upload a text document (.doc, .pdf
and a couple others) or paste your essay into a text field. Strangely, there
was no option to type directly into the webpage.

I struggle with writing quickly, so I made the (rather poor) decision to
continue writing up until about 20 seconds remained. I pasted my response and
clicked submit with about 10 seconds left. The timer continued to count down
and I was panicked because the submission was still loading. It finally went
through with only 3 seconds remaining.

------
pfortuny
Unvelievable.

I ask my students to send my texts by email. This minimizes any kind of
crapload of shit that can happen with any app. And size is irrelevant: just
send several mails if (should not happen) your photos take more than 20mb.

------
jrgaston
I can't comment on the technical challenges here but I sure can express
sympathy with the students and teachers. I used to teach AP Chemistry, a very
challenging course, like all APs I guess. My first reaction was they're still
giving the exams? The security around the exams is usually so tight.

Well, I always told my students that even if you didn't do well on the spring
AP exam at least you got credit for the course (AP students got a gpa bump at
my school), learned a lot of wonderful chemistry, and you got a good taste of
what a college course is like.

~~~
frompdx
> and you got a good taste of what a college course is like.

I did not take the AP chemistry exam and did not take any college level
chemistry. I did take two years worth of AP English and earned college credits
taking those exams. I also minored in English in college.

Overall, I found my college level English classes to be significantly less
challenging than my high school AP classes. The AP classes were grueling but
also worthwhile. Each week we wrote one to two essays in class following old
AP prompts. Leading up to the exam we were writing three essays a week. In
addition, we covered about three times the amount of literature that regular
English classes at the same grade level covered while also having required
summer reading and book reports due at the beginning of the school year.

The classes killed my interest in reading fiction and I have probably read
less fiction in the last 15 years than I did during those two classes. On the
other hand, I was surprised by how poor some of my peer's writing skills were
when I started taking 300 and 400 level English classes in college. I was
thankful for the AP classes when I saw how far behind some were.

I'm not the greatest writer. However, those classes, and the excellent
teachers who taught them, gave me the ability to write. Before those classes I
struggled to write the very few essays I was required to write. Afterwards, I
churned out essays with ease while my peers struggled to meet the minimum
essay length. The experience was one of my most important educational
experiences.

------
qubex
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.

~~~
mchan889
These students are high school students. I'm very doubtful that this course
covered material like file types and encoding. First year CS classes are
almost exclusively programming basics and architecture.

This line of thinking only really makes sense if you presuppose that every
person taking a computer science course in high school has an understanding of
file types. Many don't have this knowledge. I don't see why students should
need to have additional knowledge that is outside the scope of a course, just
to pass the clase.

There's a reason these things are taught in a CS program, often at higher
levels. And that's because they're not common knowledge.

~~~
qubex
She’s taking an exam. Surely she should understand these things by the _end_
of the curriculum, right? I mean, she’s just been learning them... or should
have.

Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time
(late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so
forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as
Turing machines, lambda calculus, decidability, computability, and the theory
of recursive functions. I remember my exam required proving the identity
between a particular integral and the Euler (not Riemann) zeta function and
whether it could be evaluated in polynomial time to an arbitrary degree of
approximation. We had to sketch out the algorithm that would do this in terms
of pseudocode.

Trying to transcode a file by changing the extension... I dunno... it seems
kind of meek.

~~~
gbear605
Was that all covered by your first semester course? Because if so, that’s more
impressive than a first semester course and MIT, CMU, or Harvard, let alone
what a public school can offer.

~~~
qubex
That was covered by a two-year IB (International Baccalaureate) course in
Computer Science running from 1997 until 1998. I attended a private school
(the International School of Milan).

~~~
gbear605
I don’t know the IB system, but AP tests are equivalent to testing students on
a first semester college class. In computer science in the US, that means
basic data structures and simple algorithms, and it’s been that way for the
last thirty five years at least.

~~~
mchan889
I generally don't like to say people are making things up, however there is a
lot of mythology around how much work IB students do. I've frequently seen IB
students while I was in undergrad boasting about their level of proficiency,
despite it seldom being supported.

~~~
qubex
If you think I’m boasting about something from more than two decades ago,
that’s your problem, not mine.

------
dreamcompiler
This is enterprise software, which by definition means the people who approved
and purchased it are not the people forced to use it. That alone usually makes
it garbage.

"Enterprise software" also frequently implies it was supplied by the lowest
bidder, and that means it was poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and poorly-
tested by inexperienced programmers.

And hundreds of students are at its mercy. This is probably actionable.

------
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.

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

~~~
xvector
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.

------
Pxtl
If any other vendor had decided to switch to a home-brew patent-encumbered
format as the _default_ format for image storage, we'd mock them relentlessly.
But because Apple is the best at everything, somehow switching their entire
software stack away from an accepted global standard instead of doing the hard
work of getting widespread adoption first before going all-in gets a pass.

------
voldacar
> Everly Kai, a senior in British Columbia, had the same problem with Computer
> Science A last week — she attempted to rename the file to JPEG and received
> the same email a few hours after submitting her test.

If you're taking a CompSci test and you think that renaming a file changes it
from one image codec to another, you probably don't have a bright future in
CompSci. just sayin'

------
projektfu
I suppose either they didn’t call Apple up for help or it’s no longer possible
to do so in any meaningful way. This is bad press for Apple, too.

~~~
gbear605
The only change they needed to make was one line on their upload form
(according to comments elsewhere on the post). This wasn’t an Apple support
issue, this was a lack of trying and sufficient testing on the College Board’s
part.

~~~
projektfu
Afterward, when they have thousands of images they can’t access, it’s a
support issue. It’s time sensitive so they can’t just have people re-upload
the images, but retesting is a bad solution.

------
dusted
But.. it SAID on the page JPEG, and they uploaded some other random file.. The
actual problem here is not that it does not handle the HEIC files, but that it
does not return an error message detailing it so students can upload with a
supported format.

------
supernova87a
I think this year is going to have to be written off in terms of secondary
education.

These AP tests, which are already probably one of the few objective
competence-based exams, are going to be not trustworthy given all these
issues. While probably not being grossly cheated on under this new format by
huge numbers of students, it just is not believable that they're producing
results fairly comparable with controlled testing environments.

Add to that the asinine notion to move everyone to Pass/Fail (or even "all-
As", ala Berkeley) out of equity reasons, and this year is just an exercise in
social promotion -- it's for sure not an exercise in effective education. I'm
sure this will just add to the calls to toss out all tests (SAT, ACT, AP,
etc), and just move to having your own teachers assess you on whether you're
ready for college (no unintended consequences there, I'm sure!).

~~~
gbear605
The problem is that we already don’t care about the learning, just the
credentials. Everyone making these accommodations is doing so because they
know that there’s no point on holding students back when it doesn’t help
anyone to do so. Certainly not the students, but also not the school systems,
the colleges, the future employers, and not even society generally.

------
einpoklum
For people not in the US: AP mean "Advanced Placement";

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_exams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_exams)

------
bdcravens
If it's a matter of transferring files from the phone to the desktop,
uploading to Dropbox and then accessing the file from Dropbox does automatic
HEIC-to-JPG conversion (do this for sites like eBay)

------
darepublic
So if you need more time to cram just upload with this image format

------
gatvol
If at scale companies are going to deploy new formats at scale they could help
out by adding support for said formats to common processing libraries long
before the fact.

~~~
gbear605
HEIC has been in wide use for three years now (about half of Americans use it,
knowingly or not), and this was a one line change on the upload form that the
College Board didn’t include.

------
joncp
If I were a tort lawyer, I'd be salivating right now.

~~~
43920
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/20/class-
ac...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/20/class-action-
lawsuit-filed-against-college-board-about-botched-ap-tests/)

------
camillomiller
Fun fact (and obscure feature): If you edit a pic on your iphone, even just
slightly cropping it, the system saves it as a jpeg. This to me is a testament
to 2 things: phone manufacturers have a problem with feature discovery; these
students are lazy and unable to operate even the most basic Google search,
which would have resulted in this or many other quick solutions to make the
file compatible. Frankly? They better be smarter next time, instead of putting
the burden on the developers (who actually baked in the right exception)

------
xvector
What blatant incompetence on so many levels. There are so many people here
that need to lose their jobs, COVID be damned.

------
johnnyAghands
I love cheap labour. Seriously you get what you pay for and no one wants to
fucking pay what good software is worth.

------
gok
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?

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theodric
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!?

~~~
xvector
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.

------
techbio
So what does this do to “the curve”?

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noja
Here you go college board, this one is for free:

    
    
        heif-convert -q 95 "$i" "$i.jpg"

------
allard
consider Postel's law

------
bchociej
.

~~~
save_ferris
So you build a service that doesn’t properly validate or gracefully handle
invalid file types and it’s my fault as the end user when I try to upload
something and the system fails?

If you build a service that can’t support one of the most commonly used
platforms in the world, that’s on you the developer, not me the user. This is
software engineering 101 right here, and was completely avoidable on the part
of the developers.

~~~
bchociej
.

~~~
save_ferris
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 these
kinds of issues.

I think the anger around Apple's hostility towards standards is valid, but
completely out of scope for this kind of issue.

~~~
bchociej
.

~~~
save_ferris
> 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.

