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"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

"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?
- pwthornton 6y ago
  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.
  - dmitrygr 6y ago
    > adding support for one more image format I seem to remember that HEIC is quite patent-encumbered. Could this possibly cost them a lot or be more complicated than you seem to imply?
  - mrlala 6y ago
    Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.
    - vb6sp6 6y ago
      People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer
      - mrlala 6y ago
        What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...
droopyEyelids 6y ago
To be realistic, that is an acceptable answer if the person being screwed lacks alternatives and negotiating power. You mean "I don't want 'you"re screwed, sorry' to be an acceptable answer" and I get that, but I'm committed to using honest language about this because thats we you train ourselves to be wary and give these situations the respect they deserve.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  No, it's not acceptable. They might be able to get away with it, but that doesn't make it okay.
j45 6y ago
Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. It's honestly one of the biggest conundrums facing academia. Year by year, incoming students generally have a higher base level of digital literacy than their instructors, because academic institutions did not prioritize developing those skills 10-20 years ago and the proof is showing in the pandemic pudding.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. Many people who are very knowledgable in technology (the SV bubble is rather an exception) are very conservative in terms of it. Don't confuse good programmers with "technology hipsters".
  - j45 6y ago
    I'm not talking about programmers at all - rather the technology strategy and policy designers and implementers that come before them. My background includes software dev in and around online education for almost 20y in both industry and academic. Totally outside bubbles and following groupthink :) The conservatism from technologists that you speak of.. in part comes from the politics at post secondaries and the resistance towards adopting technology. There's no shortage of understanding in most institutions of the problems and how to solve them, only the political will, and leadership who cares.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  I don't know what academic institutions you're talking about (it means university in my book), but in non of the academic institutions I worked for did the academics have anything to do with IT decision making (except for maybe filling out a survey). Which is unfortunate because then we wouldn't have to deal with stupid IT people coming from large businesses and thinking that universities are just the same as any business. To give you examples of some of the stupidity I have seen from university IT (and yes they are almost completely recruited from other large businesses): operating system researchers not given admin rights, every semester break reimaging the lab pc and never checking that the special drivers and software for the lab equipment is installed correctly (solution: have the professors/academics check every lab PC before semester starts, great thing to check 200 PCs one week before the beginning of the lectures where you have lots of other things to do), no ability to share calendars with outside people because security (suggested workaround just sync to Google on you phone and use that, I kidd you not). Generally, only buy Microsoft (or some other huge proprietary vendor) tech which can never be adjusted to the needs of the academics actually working with it. TLDR there is lots of things wrong with It in academia, but academics making the decisions is not one of them. Also, generally most universities I know about were reasonably well prepared for online courses and it worked largely seemlessly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
walshemj 6y ago
One might also ask why in 2020 your taking an exam and then photographing it. Some of those with problems actually had real computers as well.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  it may be way write physics, math calculation with pen and paper than trying to type that in the computer.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    The example given was an English paper
dv_dt 6y ago
The college board is a pretty badly managed technology and testing monopoly (duopoly). e.g. retrieval of scores in past years for the SAT was gated by region, but if you got on a VPN you could get your scores from unreleased regions. I had a niece provide their credentials to a sketchy website that in the end delivered scores "early", but there was a talk about online security afterwards with the parents and the neice. I do have some mixed sympathy for having to set up a whole new online testing scheme for the tests due to Covid, but their approach was so odd. Students were also instructed to compose text answers outside the test pages, and copy and paste them into answer boxes. An odd & ugly solution, but it points to at least some thought about trying to mitigate unreliabilities.
mturmon 6y ago
> ... We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming. ... I see where you're going here, and I want to agree, but you aren't reckoning with the incentives for cheating on the AP. My kid is taking the "AP World" test today. One of her classmates was asked to sit by a different student to coach them at their computer during the test, because the test is done remotely this year rather than in person. I'm afraid that if you give N people an option like this, a fraction will exploit it.
- vehementi 6y ago
  They would have a server log of who tried on time to submit it and had server errors. Those people could not have foreseen this... so we can accept their late submissions

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?

pwthornton 6y ago
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.
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  > adding support for one more image format I seem to remember that HEIC is quite patent-encumbered. Could this possibly cost them a lot or be more complicated than you seem to imply?
- mrlala 6y ago
  Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.
  - vb6sp6 6y ago
    People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer
    - mrlala 6y ago
      What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...

droopyEyelids 6y ago

To be realistic, that is an acceptable answer if the person being screwed lacks alternatives and negotiating power. You mean "I don't want 'you"re screwed, sorry' to be an acceptable answer" and I get that, but I'm committed to using honest language about this because thats we you train ourselves to be wary and give these situations the respect they deserve.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
No, it's not acceptable. They might be able to get away with it, but that doesn't make it okay.

j45 6y ago

Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. It's honestly one of the biggest conundrums facing academia. Year by year, incoming students generally have a higher base level of digital literacy than their instructors, because academic institutions did not prioritize developing those skills 10-20 years ago and the proof is showing in the pandemic pudding.

wolfgke 6y ago
> Far too many technology decisions and implementations in post-secondaries are made by academic/bureaucrats who have no expertise or background in technology. Many people who are very knowledgable in technology (the SV bubble is rather an exception) are very conservative in terms of it. Don't confuse good programmers with "technology hipsters".
- j45 6y ago
  I'm not talking about programmers at all - rather the technology strategy and policy designers and implementers that come before them. My background includes software dev in and around online education for almost 20y in both industry and academic. Totally outside bubbles and following groupthink :) The conservatism from technologists that you speak of.. in part comes from the politics at post secondaries and the resistance towards adopting technology. There's no shortage of understanding in most institutions of the problems and how to solve them, only the political will, and leadership who cares.
cycomanic 6y ago
I don't know what academic institutions you're talking about (it means university in my book), but in non of the academic institutions I worked for did the academics have anything to do with IT decision making (except for maybe filling out a survey). Which is unfortunate because then we wouldn't have to deal with stupid IT people coming from large businesses and thinking that universities are just the same as any business. To give you examples of some of the stupidity I have seen from university IT (and yes they are almost completely recruited from other large businesses): operating system researchers not given admin rights, every semester break reimaging the lab pc and never checking that the special drivers and software for the lab equipment is installed correctly (solution: have the professors/academics check every lab PC before semester starts, great thing to check 200 PCs one week before the beginning of the lectures where you have lots of other things to do), no ability to share calendars with outside people because security (suggested workaround just sync to Google on you phone and use that, I kidd you not). Generally, only buy Microsoft (or some other huge proprietary vendor) tech which can never be adjusted to the needs of the academics actually working with it. TLDR there is lots of things wrong with It in academia, but academics making the decisions is not one of them. Also, generally most universities I know about were reasonably well prepared for online courses and it worked largely seemlessly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

walshemj 6y ago

One might also ask why in 2020 your taking an exam and then photographing it. Some of those with problems actually had real computers as well.

FalconSensei 6y ago
it may be way write physics, math calculation with pen and paper than trying to type that in the computer.
- walshemj 6y ago
  The example given was an English paper

dv_dt 6y ago

The college board is a pretty badly managed technology and testing monopoly (duopoly). e.g. retrieval of scores in past years for the SAT was gated by region, but if you got on a VPN you could get your scores from unreleased regions. I had a niece provide their credentials to a sketchy website that in the end delivered scores "early", but there was a talk about online security afterwards with the parents and the neice. I do have some mixed sympathy for having to set up a whole new online testing scheme for the tests due to Covid, but their approach was so odd. Students were also instructed to compose text answers outside the test pages, and copy and paste them into answer boxes. An odd & ugly solution, but it points to at least some thought about trying to mitigate unreliabilities.

mturmon 6y ago

> ... We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming. ... I see where you're going here, and I want to agree, but you aren't reckoning with the incentives for cheating on the AP. My kid is taking the "AP World" test today. One of her classmates was asked to sit by a different student to coach them at their computer during the test, because the test is done remotely this year rather than in person. I'm afraid that if you give N people an option like this, a fraction will exploit it.

vehementi 6y ago
They would have a server log of who tried on time to submit it and had server errors. Those people could not have foreseen this... so we can accept their late submissions