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

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Wow. Loads of empathy on display here.

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.

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.

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So why should a student with an Apple product be punished for hostile moves Apple has made? What if the school issued the device the student took the test on? You're punishing the wrong party here.

And knowing that these big companies do stupid stuff around standards is part of building software. This isn't any different from the browser wars. It's completely unrealistic to expect developers to not have to deal with these kinds of issues.

I think the anger around Apple's hostility towards standards is valid, but completely out of scope for this kind of issue.

Take two seconds to understand the situation before you comment. iOS automatically converts images to JPEG from HEIC if you use a standard input. College Board didn't, and then somehow either failed to do QA testing with iOS devices entirely, or did a poor job in not catching this huge bug. The failure here is definitely theirs.

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> Sorry, Apple buyers, but you've purchased a device that flaunts standards, and you must expect it to cause problems.

Sounds like you're putting blame on the students in this situation.

Why must we rush to blame, instead of solve problems?

It does gracefully handle invalid formats. The problem that students did not follow the directions provided on how to take pictures in an appropriate format. Instead they tried their own hacks, such as changing the file extension.

Another user here claims their daughter was informed repeatedly before the test that HEIC was not supported and given instructions on how to change their phone settings to ensure comparability. This is confirmed in the article:

> though it does link to the College Board’s website, which instructs students with iPhones to change their camera settings so that photos save as JPEGs rather than HEICs.

This is not what happened, as per the article. The problem was with people who were downloading images from their phone to their desktop in HEIC format, then either failing to convert the images to JPEG, or complaining that the conversion process took too long.

>He Airdropped an iPhone image of his responses to his Mac and tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG.

Everly Kai 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.

> Sean S. used OneDrive to port a photo to his Windows desktop from his iPhone, then attempted to convert the file with Windows Photo. Due to the photo’s size, the conversion took over five minutes.

The AP testing website has instructions for changing iPhone settings to the appropriate format and a user here confirms that their daughter was repeatedly informed of this matter before the AP test.

https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/students/takin...

HEIC is a ISO standard that has a free codec.

Editing your comments simply because you were shown your mistakes is ridiculous. Own up to your mistakes please.