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

• NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  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.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  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
• winter_blue 6y ago
  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.)
  • disabled 6y ago
    ^ This. College Board messed up severely on this issue.
  • bscphil 6y ago
    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.
• polygot 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
  • user5994461 6y ago
    Popular image manipulation libraries work with raw bytes and they identify the encoding from the first few bytes of headers. When a software work with common libraries, there is a good chance that it can deal indifferently with all the formats the library can understand (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc...) A file explorer or website may filter by extensions, preventing to submit formats that are actually supported. A workaround is to rename the extension and hope it is supposed anyway. Didn't work in this case. They tried and the picture was corrupted. It doesn't support the new apple encoding.
• jrgaston 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
• _bxg1 6y ago
  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.
  • wmf 6y ago
    18F released a pretty good guide about these topics but I can't shake the feeling that many organizations aren't willing to learn these lessons. https://github.com/18F/technology-budgeting/blob/master/handbook.md https://github.com/18F/technology-budgeting/blob/master/hand...
    • 6y ago
• crazygringo 6y ago
  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.
  • danso 6y ago
    Would it be correct for iOS Safari to quietly reencode to jpeg when a HEIC file is uploaded via a webform? How would Safari know that the site's backend didn't want an HEIC file? I agree the HEIC thing is very confusing (having set up my parents' phones recently), but I can't see how Apple is to blame. For starters, the College Board could've done a much better job emphasizing this step for iOS users in its instructions page. But for me, the overriding factor that places blame squarely on the College Board is this from the article: > Senior Dave Spencer took a demo test before his Calculus AB exam to make sure he understood the process for uploading photos. He Airdropped an iPhone image of his responses to his Mac and tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG. Changing a file’s extension does not guarantee that it will be converted, but Spencer was still able to submit the demo test with no problem. > Spencer used the same process on the real exam and thought it went through, but he received an email the next day saying the files were corrupted and that he needed to retake the test. So it seems that students had access to a demo before test day. If I'm reading the story right: - During the demo, Dave's phone produced a HEIC file - The demo upload initially failed. So Dave renamed the file extension to PNG. - Dave uploaded the PNG (in name only), and the demo did not return an error. - Dave assumed, quite understandably, that the renaming trick would work on test day too. So the onus in the College Board here: they provided a demo in which the photo upload function appears to have been stubbed (e.g. "if 'PNG|JPG|JPEG' is filename, print "Success"), giving students and teachers false assurance that photo uploads would work on test day.
• tasogare 6y ago
  > 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.
• sokoloff 6y ago
  > 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.
• snazz 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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?
    • 6y ago
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Irony here is that College Board's core business is testing.
    • SilasX 6y ago
      Ironically, the service the College Board is selling ... is itself testing, just of a different kind.
  • maxwindiff 6y ago
    Honestly this is the most stupid part. And I don't think College Board (or whoever made the site) didn't do any testing -- if that's the case the site should be way more broken. It's probably a problem of setting non-realistic test cases.
• coffeefirst 6y ago
  "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.
  • dtech 6y ago
    The articles seems to indicate that the upload crashed, so they probably don't have the files
    • save_ferris 6y ago
      Which is why GP proposed giving students the opportunity to email the files separately.
  • chapium 6y ago
    This is college board we are talking about. I guess parents will just have to pay for another exam and hope its graded fairly.
  • xienyc 6y ago
    >"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?
• II2II 6y ago
  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.
  • machello13 6y ago
    > JPEG being referred to as a "most compatible" rather than by name in the settings. The settings do explicitly mention JPEG though: > Most Compatible will always use JPEG/H.264...
  • xienyc 6y ago
    Ironically the person from the article who attempted converting the HEIC files to JPG by renaming them was taking a Computer Science test.
    • ativzzz 6y ago
      Computer literacy is not one of the topics covered by high school computer science.
    • hdctambien 6y ago
      I have to teach an entire lesson about downloading a file, finding it in the downloads folder, and unzipping it. Apple did a good job abstracting away the file system.
• kassouni 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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!
• abakker 6y ago
  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.
• darepublic 6y ago
  So if you need more time to cram just upload with this image format
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• tempestn 6y ago
  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.
• IvanK_net 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?
    • sethammons 6y ago
      I recall the shift from jpeg to png as a web default. Many sites would not accept one or the other. Eventually, png became more and more popular and "won." The same can happen with other formats, but it takes time. Any any site/org/company that deals with these uploads or displaying the images needs to be clear on what they can do and error out early when they can't do it. I recall "sorry, you tried to upload a png file, we only support jpeg" messages with links to details about the difference and how to convert them. And mime inspection worked back then too, so changing the extension was not good enough.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • IvanK_net 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        But that isn’t true about HEIC. There isn’t a license fee.
• Causality1 6y ago
  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.
• nmstoker 6y ago
  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.
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    My first thought was students who don't have access to a computer outside of school. It seems like these students are taking the exam from their phones: > But the testing portal doesn’t support the default format on iOS devices and some newer Android phones, HEIC files.
  • ReverseCold 6y ago
    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.
    • nmstoker 6y ago
      I see, so typing entries is purely a Covid-19 reaction? Sorry, hadn't appreciated that earlier. Definitely feels like something to keep after things go back to closer to how they were.
    • snazz 6y ago
      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.
• chucksmash 6y ago
  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.
• Hokusai 6y ago
  > 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.
  • jp555 6y ago
    You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? I don't put as much faith in that as you.
    • Hokusai 6y ago
      > You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? It works for building regulations, for electric regulations, for food safety regulations, for all the rest of industries actually. If anything we see people dying because that regulations are not enforced or are removed after lobbying. So, software is not going to be "better" but more reliable and a less costly foundation for the rest of business and industries. So, software is going to be better for the end users even if it is worse for us to develop. Do you think that all the students that are now worried of failing are thinking "at least I got HEIC images in my phone". They do not care, and why should they? Regulations are a trade off. How deep and or even intrusive future regulation are going to be depends on how much misalignment there is between Apple/Google/Facebook business models and everyone else needs and wants. Each time that the Internet is broken and costs people time and money, the fingers are going to point to our industry.
• joncp 6y ago
  If I were a tort lawyer, I'd be salivating right now.
  • 43920 6y ago
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/20/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-college-board-about-botched-ap-tests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/05/20/class-ac...
• cm2187 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        > 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?"
  • kortilla 6y ago
    People who grew up with cars still frequently can’t change oil or change flat tires. A huge chunk of people will always do the minimum for basic usage and never dig deeper.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    It gives the appearance of working on Windows. If you change the file extension of a picture, you can still open it, so it may come from that experience.
• noja 6y ago
  Here you go college board, this one is for free: heif-convert -q 95 "$i" "$i.jpg"
• supernova87a 6y ago
  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!).
  • wiredfool 6y ago
    I think you’re confusing credentials with education. While education may also be in a questionable state this year, it is a different issue than not being able to submit the answers on an exam.
  • gbear605 6y ago
    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.
• mywittyname 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  • xvector 6y ago
    This is a ridiculous statement. It’s the College Board’s job to validate input files. How incompetent do you have to be to just fail if someone uploads a different format? That is absurdly unacceptable for the multi-billion dollar industry that the College aboard is.
• bchociej 6y ago
  .
  • Ensorceled 6y ago
    Wow. Loads of empathy on display here.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • junaru 6y ago
    This, last time i encountered it even windows 10 didn't display them and wanted me to buy a decoder from windows store. This was probably due to licensing fees. This story shows what happens when you 'think different' from established standards.
    • gbear605 6y ago
      HEIC is a ISO standard that has a free codec.
  • save_ferris 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      .
• rock_artist 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    HEIC isn’t a proprietary codec, it’s an ISO standard
    • pornel 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        My understanding (based on http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEIC-Yeah.html http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI... ) is that HEIC is not built on patents while HEVC is, so HEVC is problematic to use, but HEIC isn’t.
        • kuyaz 6y ago
          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.
• vaidhy 6y ago
  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.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    We are criticizing them because fixing the software to accept it and batch convert it later should be relatively easy.
    • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      HEIC is patent encumbered. The system should have blocked it and linked to the instructions on how to get a png/jpeg
  • kleiba 6y ago
    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.
• theodric 6y ago
  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!?
  • gbear605 6y ago
    Samsung uses it too. And the iPhone automatically converts it to jpegs, but the College Board’s form disabled that functionality.
  • xvector 6y ago
    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.
• turdnagel 6y ago
  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."
• irrational 6y ago
  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.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    Double edged sword I suppose. If you felt you did poorly you now have another chance to do well. But if you felt like you did well then you'll probably get a lower score.
  • karthikshan 6y ago
    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)
  • chadlavi 6y ago
    It also means you need to go through the traumatic and stressful experience of taking the test again, when you thought you were already past it.
• pfortuny 6y ago
  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.
• gatvol 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
• qubex 6y ago
  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.
  • duiker101 6y ago
    its not unheard that websites do only extension validation for uploads, worth a try!
    • qubex 6y ago
      That totally misses the point though, because if the website only validates on the basis of extension and accepts the format in an unrecognised format, the backend won’t know how to handle it anyway. There’s no point uploading a HEIC file disguised as a PNG (or whatever) if eventually somewhere along the workflow an examiner is actually going to have to open that file in a program that doesn’t know how to parse HEICs.
      • gbear605 6y ago
        Perhaps the examiner’s program accepts HEICs and the frontend was unnecessarily limiting. Many systems are like that, and it’s frustrating that the College Board’s wasn’t.
        • qubex 6y ago
          The examiner’s client program is likely a browser that connects to a web-hosted system, and with the exception of Safari, other browsers do not (yet) handle HEIC natively nor even gracefully.
  • mchan889 6y ago
    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.
• jchw 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    They did not anticipate idiots renaming files to "convert" them.
    • jchw 6y ago
      I dunno how we can expect ordinary people to fully understand what’s going on and how to fix it without any guidance.
    • xvector 6y ago
      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.
• projektfu 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
• jedberg 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • jedberg 6y ago
      You bring up a really good point that I didn't consider, that iPhone SEs default to HEIC. Thank you.
    • bscphil 6y ago
      > 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 6y ago
        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.
• gok 6y ago
  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?
• azinman2 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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-HEIC-Yeah.html http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...
    • azinman2 6y ago
      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.
      • lone_haxx0r 6y ago
• APtemp9372 6y ago
  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.
• hinkley 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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?
• kyle-rb 6y ago
  > 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.)
• bdcravens 6y ago
  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)
• allard 6y ago
  consider Postel's law
• braythwayt 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      Most other sites would accept the upload, try to parse it and then return an error message. Its always the sites fault if it just gets stuck
      • httpsterio 6y ago
        Eh that's not often a good idea. The service should only look at the file header for the mime type and decide based on that if it should even begin to upload. Mime types can be spoofed and if you read the data blob's mime from its' type, then just an extension rename will fool it. But if you look at the magic numbers you're saving your server's resources and the uploader's time as it doesn't even try to move the file if the mime is not acceptable. No reason not to do it on the client-side first.
• rs23296008n1 6y ago
  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.
• xvector 6y ago
  What blatant incompetence on so many levels. There are so many people here that need to lose their jobs, COVID be damned.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  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.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  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.
• voldacar 6y ago
  > 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'
• camillomiller 6y ago
  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)
• dusted 6y ago
  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.
• johnnyAghands 6y ago
  I love cheap labour. Seriously you get what you pay for and no one wants to fucking pay what good software is worth.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• techbio 6y ago
  So what does this do to “the curve”?
• ipsocannibal 6y ago
  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.