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

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669 points danso | 3 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 2.408s | source
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cm2187 ◴[21 May 20 18:02 UTC] No.23262241[source]▶
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.
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1. vosper ◴[21 May 20 18:06 UTC] No.23262331[source]▶
> 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.

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2. megiddo ◴[21 May 20 18:22 UTC] No.23262613[source]▶
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.

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3. vosper ◴[21 May 20 21:02 UTC] No.23265279[source]▶
> 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?"