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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

It works pretty much everywhere. None of the major OS’s trust the extension for images.

I want to caveat this a bit. The OS does trust the extension of any file (at least MacOS/Windows). If you change a .png to a .docx, the OS will launch the handler associated with .docx files. If you change a .png to a .jpg, the OS will launch the handler for .jpg files. Chances are that program is the same for .jpg as it would have been for .png. When that program launches, reads the file, it probably looks at the file signature and then appropriately parses the rest of the image data.

Arguably, the user has been trained to think that renaming between image format converts between the two because of the image processing program correctly parsing and displaying the image, rather than displaying a message that the user opened a .jpg file but it was really a .png.

There are lots of website and apps where renaming the file is the best solution for an enduser, because of systems that are the counter part of this that limit the option on the frontend but allow it on the backend. There’s no reason why any system should care about a file’s extension type. It’s meaningless.

> 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?"

Yeah, I was going to add that Verge seems confused on this point too.

> 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. The College Board’s tweet went out just a few hours before Spencer’s scheduled exam; he doesn’t have a Twitter account and didn’t see it.

Obviously changing the file extension just bypassed the filtering that allows the demo test to be submitted. It's just checking that the extension is in a whitelist. There's no "does not guarantee that it will be converted" about this and The Verge's reporting is misleading on that score, IMO. Changing the extension simply does not affect the problem, it just means you're lying to the website about the format of the image.