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

AP stat/ AP Chem/ AP Phys etc are about math formulae and explaining the calculation. I do not want my kids to learn TeX or figure out word formula editor just before the AP exams.

This brings up an interesting point: how come math input is so difficult on a computer? Even TeX seems like an awful solution for this.

I would have preferred taking AP stats/physics/CS/Calculus with a computer, and that was over a decade ago. (AP French also used cassette tapes to record yourself with. Looks like they transitioned to the modern digital age in 2017, but I'm sure every year before then they had a sizable number of students with blank tape or broken tape submissions.)

I had already taught myself the basic TeX for math formulas before I took any AP test that could have used it, I even set up a PHP portal to do simple chemical equation balancing that would use LaTeX behind the scenes and spit out PNGs. There are nice JS libraries to do everything client-side now, so in any online portal it could be seamlessly mixed in with a reference and live-preview right next to it. All I'm saying is it's really not hard -- you can learn what you need in under an hour -- and if you step back and think about the type of student taking these tests they're also the type of student likely to pursue these subjects in college, so they're likely going to have to learn much more of LaTeX eventually anyway.

Where neither plain text nor LaTeX help much is when you really need to draw something out. I'd say mouse drawings are better than nothing, but you can also just remove questions/scoring that rely on display of such. Nothing stops a student from drawing privately on their own paper -- indeed as I recall a lot of the questions from some of those AP tests were exactly like that: do your work on paper you throw out after, because the answer is multiple choice.

It's really most surprising that they didn't go with a fully online test (which means no manual submission of purely offline artifacts) and haven't been preparing for such at all over the years...

Ask a Chinese or Japanese friend why typing is hard.

It's not though? $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$. If you have a visualizer hooked up while you're typing, even easier.

And then there's Mathematica.

I mean you essentially need to learn a pseudo language on top of math to be able to do that. The barrier to entry compared to writing pen and paper is much higher, and math is hard enough for a vast number of Americans.

What you wrote is almost unreadable to me in the text itself. The only reason I got it is because I recognized the formula from sqrt(b^2 - 4ac).

x = (-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)

This, however is somewhat readable. Requiring me to use TeX or Mathematica is what I would consider difficult. Whenever I actually need to write math they won't be available. I'd have more luck using custom emojis as math symbols in most cases.

It's not though. You just type out the pronunciation and pick from a list if there are multiple. I'm actually surprised we don't have something like that for standard math input.

Chinese friend: "If you use pinyin not at all. There are other ways such as stroke based, I have never learned it."

This matches my prediction. Typing Japanese isn't hard either (and I'm just a beginning learner) -- typing ha in JP mode gives は, or if you're only in JP mode the typical layout assigns that to qwerty 'f'. Like Chinese, IME drop-down selection works well for kanji.

Ok, how long do you think it'd take to get somewhat comfortable with reading/writing such things? Would it really be "so difficult"? You can also write what you wrote in TeX too, it just won't look as nice in the output and might mislead a reader into thinking a multiplication of s, q, r, t is happening as well as wondering what's going on with the "+-". ± is a symbol too you know.. On Linux it's just compose key then + then -. (Edit: while I'm mentioning it, the compose key is great. Could write it as x = (-b ± √(b² - 4ac))/(2a) -- with √ being compose then v then /, and ² being compose then ^ then 2.)

You can also write that in Mathematica, and it will look nice + understand that sqrt() is the square root function, though I think it will interpret the "+-" as "-".

Under what conditions are you writing math on a computer where you don't have proper tools to do it? (Mathematica isn't the only one, and even if you're using a programming language like Python you can write almost exactly what you wrote by adjusting/clarifying the operators.) Where possibly the most math-written-with-computer happens is MathOverflow, and hey, they use TeX extensively. And when you ask a question, they show a preview below so you can make sure your math is formatted in a readable way too and not just in the easiest way to type.

The context here isn't the average American, but a high school student taking an AP test involving writing math -- where scoring well counts for the same credit as having passed the equivalent entry level course(s) in college.

Besides, math is already pseudo language on top of pseudo language. Learning notation is part of math, I'll concede learning to type an expression on a computer is a different notation than writing it with pen, but if you can't learn that, why learn math? Each domain does its own thing too and isn't even necessarily consistent. Guy Steele gave a great talk a few years ago on "Computer Science Metanotation", and that's just one area of math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q (Edit: And to conclude here, learning to read and write with some notation tends to be easy, it's learning what the math actually means that is the hard part.)

>Under what conditions are you writing math on a computer where you don't have proper tools to do it?

Chat applications. From IRCs and MSNs to Skypes, Telegrams and Discords. Other places would be comment sections such as these. They're never going to have built in TeX or any other such support.

Does the compose key work on different keyboard layouts?

>but if you can't learn that, why learn math?

You can say this, but you won't like the response. The response is probably "okay" and they just won't learn math. I don't think the world is better off when that happens. It's not a question of whether people are capable of doing this, it's a question of whether this is worthwhile.

I was about to write math exam using latex

It'd be one of the biggest mistakes because I'd need like 2 hours more to write it.

I was running out of time HARD despite being somewhat experienced with it

> Does the compose key work on different keyboard layouts?

Yup, switching to Dvorak and the sequence is the same (. then [ on qwerty). There also seems to be an ibus mode for it in ibus-table-others, along with a mode that tries to map LaTeX to unicode symbols, but I haven't tried either.

As for your other remark, I remember back in the day using the Gaim-LaTeX plugin to communicate LaTeX with people over MSN/AIM/IRC/etc... If you had the plugin, it would auto-render LaTeX for you. I also think there may have been a plugin that would send the other party an image instead so you could still share if they didn't have it. I haven't used anything like it in a long time as my need to communicate or have communicated formatted math to people over IM is pretty much 0 these days, but perhaps https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-latex/ still works. But also on IRC, many rooms have bots that accept programs to eval and print, typically used for math calculations, and then you just use the syntax of the language instead of LaTeX.

For Skype, Telegram, Discord, comment hosts like HN or Discus or blog software, that's a failing on them for not implementing a very well-known standard (TeX)...

But you can still share raw TeX strings, especially since almost everyone at least implements some sort of blockquote or monotext formatting system where it's possible to bypass markdown et al. rules turning 345 into nonsense. And while you may have found it difficult to read the equation I posted earlier, I'd be really surprised if it took you a long time to get comfortable enough to read it and other arbitrary equations around whatever level of math you have in their raw TeX form (especially if the poster bothered to format it a bit more nicely with whitespace, which I didn't do). It's kind of like getting used to reading regexes, but even easier.

I guess maybe you could try to convince me it's more difficult to pick up (even for a high schooler) than I think, perhaps since I've just been used to it for so long and the last time I saw someone pick it up was in college? And of course this is only talking about writing math with the purpose of displaying it nicely in the end, actually calculating will tend to involve another syntax yet again but I don't think those are typically bad either... Perhaps raw Python can be terrible if you're trying to do symbolic math, but then why wouldn't you be using a system explicitly for that or even in Python use SymPy (and I'm just now remembering there's that whole Jupyter ecosystem that I'm sure has support for SymPy and rendering nice looking math with LaTeX). I've enjoyed Maxima, which even in a terminal does a good job with ASCII graphics http://maxima.sourceforge.net/i/maximacl.png but of course there's a graphical front end.

I got a bit off topic but as a last resort to communicating math over such channels, you can go to sites like https://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php?lang=en-en and write out your math (it even has some buttons to help if you don't yet know the TeX-isms) and share a link to the output like https://latex.codecogs.com/png.download?%5Cdpi%7B120%7D%20%5... Slack even downloads and displays it for you in-chat.

(It's also worth pointing out that Discord has an ok-ish Pidgin connector... and even my ghetto home-grown blog has had LaTeX support for posts and comments through a JS library that I haven't bothered to update since 2012. It even lets you right-click to view the TeX source too, example near the bottom here https://www.thejach.com/view/2011/9/playing_with_morton_numb... So never say never!)