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

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either specifying the accepted types directly in the web page’s input tag (as many have pointed out, and thus would have just worked correctly in the background), or by accepting and converting HEIC files themselves. At minimum, they should have put their suggested settings changes into the webpage itself before you started, and/or given a practice website to make sure it worked correctly.

College board owns this process, and it’s their job to make sure the setup works correctly for all students, including those who might not all be technically inclined.

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default.

[1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923

[2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the <input> tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats.

It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they could purchase to do that for them. This isn't an open-source endeavor, and they charge each student to take the exam.

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Closed/liscenced crap != innovation.

I don’t care which part of California it came out of.

Why does Safari still not support webp then?

Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.

1. I think both parties are at fault

The testing system for not using the <input> tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents.

> It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend.

It's reasonable to assume that it is.

2. Sure, the college could pay, but looking at the broader problem here, saying that colleges should accept closed formats would make it really hard for open source online testing systems to proliferate, and all colleges around the world would have to pay royalties to the HEIC patent holders.

Even if they were to implement an open source decoder, unless you have plenty of lawyers, the legal uncertainty of the situation could be unacceptable to many individuals/institutions.

3. If the format was open in the first place, maybe we would have lots of open source decoders and maybe the library that the testing system developer used would have support for it, and would have transparently worked without the developer knowing about the format.

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers.

2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound students in the US each year.

3. There are plenty of existing open source decoders, and all major open source graphics programs already accept the format (GraphicConverter, ImageMagick, GIMP), in addition to all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android).

>Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3]

College board could have added "iPhone HEIC license surcharge" for those users - that would have gotten Apple attention :)

Compatibility with multiples browsers / platforms is usually the responsibility of the website/application.

Historically Apple has implemented what they want to out of various standards, protocols, etc, it shouldn't be a surprise.

Of course, it's not my preference when we're waiting for different operating systems or browsers to behave the same way, but that lack of compatibility has been going on for decades.

2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

Patents are separate from copyright, so even an independently developed freely licensed open-source software is illegal to use without a patent license from patent owners.

https://www.hevcadvance.com/pdfnew/LicensorList.pdf

So what formats do they accept when they want a video? Theora?

Wait. There's a way to get safari to upload HEIF without conversion? All my photos, which are HEIF on my phone, turn into jpeg when I upload them. I've been trying to get the original HEIF off for months.

Dropbox and OneDrive allow you to sync HEIF instead of JPEG.

Many places don't handle those files properly. For selling on eBay/Mercari/Poshmark, if I AirDrop from my iPhone to upload from my computer, they don't convert the file properly. (Typing descriptions etc is far easier from the computer than on a mobile app) I can setup an Apple Script to do conversions, but I've found uploading to Dropbox and pulling from the desktop version works better (Dropbox does the HEIC-JPG conversion)

I believe the onus should be on the trillion dollar company that chose to use a non-standard file format.

If you don't use your phone to upload, but transfer the file to your computer, it won't do the conversion.

> uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case

From what I've heard in articles and other sources, uploading directly from the iPhone works fine. The issue is only when students try to upload an HEIF file from a computer, instead of directly from an iPhone, which requires:

1. The student has an iPhone, which they use to take a picture of their work.

2. The student chooses not to upload directly from their iPhone, and instead wants to use their computer (presumably they're already logged in there).

3. The student's computer is a Mac, and they choose to use AirDrop (or another method that doesn't do conversion) to transfer the file instead of email (or another method that does convert to JPG).

4. The student is using Chrome/Firefox or another browser that doesn't do automatic conversion to JPG.

I would argue that this qualifies as an edge case. Presumably, CollegeBoard did their due diligence testing the basic single-device flows, but didn't cover multi-device flows, or just missed possibilities like AirDrop instead of email for transferring images.

I agree that they should have done a better job informing students; there probably should be more info on the upload page itself.

If your premise was true, then they wouldn't be tweeting this: https://twitter.com/CollegeBoard/status/1263484343084867586/...

Clearly they knew this would be an issue, and could have done multiple mitigations to handle this, including just accepting HEIC files themselves.

This whole blame game is weird. Could the college board have handled this better or have a better upload mechanism? Sure. Could apple be more clear about the way they are storing and transferring photos? Sure, finder on my macbook actually does worse in handling .heic files than my windows 10 desktop unless I sync using photos.

But if I got this right the upload page stated the accepted file formats, why should they accept anything else? Sure, there are workarounds to handle uploading .heic files and automatic conversion works in certain cases but why should they care? The onus is on the user to ensure his submission is correct.

EDIT: I just tried .heic files on my Surface and had to install an MS store app to actually be able to open .heic files in full resolution.

https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/p/heif-bilderweiterungen/9pm...

EDIT2: I guess for me it boils down to, why should we coddle the applicants? Being able to understand the conditions of a test is not an unreasonable hardship. From that I gathered the website stated the accepted file formats. The uploader source suggests it did refuse certain file formats. There are technical solutions for this/these problem(s) and of course it would be nice if every system would be perfect. But it would also be nice if people would just work within the given constraints of a system.

If I may restate your position: "If a student uploads an image in the wrong format then it is acceptable for their entire test to be invalid and they can retake the entire exam."

Rather I think what is acceptable is HEIC is not accepted by the system, and if a student attempts to submit this format they receive an error saying that only JPG images are allowed.

Yes, I was wondering why a recently completed photo upload feature for a web app didn't have this problem -- it's because we specified image/jpeg on the file input, so iPhone auto-converts. Likely a failure within the college board's software engineering processes for not testing this use case and then finding and deploying this fix? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

That really doesn’t sound like much of an edge case to me. I’m willing to bet it’s a pretty typical workflow that people have if they own Apple devices.

> If I may restate your position: "If a student uploads an image in the wrong format then it is acceptable for their entire test to be invalid and they can retake the entire exam."

Yes, being able to understand the conditions should maybe be part of passing the test. Like I said, could the upload form have handled this better? Sure, although I have not read enough to understand if this was actually the upload form failing. The OP article claims "Spencer ... tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG" which is not how you convert files. Maybe students learning that early on is not a bad thing?

No other entity other than The College Board receives the raw test. Everyone else only receives the results. The College Board also charges around $100 for each of these tests, so even if they had to support the format (they don’t) they really should easily be able to do so.

Is this for comment real? Why should being tech savvy enough to jump through esoteric technical requirements be part of the test?

> esoteric technical requirements

Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ?

Yes, this comment is for real. I'm the head of IT for a university and we do online applications. We actually accept everything within a given size requirement (which people are unable to respect). I have a bunch of scripts that run over all applications in the end to put them in the right formats, to do OCR for the photos of a printed PDF form that has been filled out by hand in pencil, I even run a script to scrape annotations in PDF portfolios to scrape video links and pass them to youtube-dl, to ensure everything submitted gets picked up and is provided for evaluation.

This is why I think it would be nice if there was at least some responsibility on the part of the student.

> Yes, being able to understand the conditions should maybe be part of passing the test.

I agree, when It's part of the subject in test. I don't see any reasonable cause for a student to have to know about file types to submit a test, if that test isn't about file types. I don't, for example, expect my doctor to know how to convert an image file because that's not his job.

> The OP article claims "Spencer ... tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG" which is not how you convert files.

This highlights the level of knowledge the users of this application have in this area. The developers should have made it Painfully Clear that uploading directly from an iPhone isn't supported.

> Maybe students learning that early on is not a bad thing?

I agree they should learn this stuff, but don't think it should cost them their grade to do so.

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't increase public understanding of these "slightly-technical" topics but I think we're a long way off and we can't expect that understanding just yet.

> Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ?

Yes, when it is outside of the scope of the test. Unless they're testing the students on their knowledge of data storage, or similar, this is out of scope.

The whole issue is easily circumvented by correctly setting the accepted inputs, which is clearly the responsibility of the webpage owners. Next time, someone uploads JPEG2000 and runs into the same problem. I guess then it’s again someone else who gets the blame?

You would be surprised how many students use an iphone and a macbook but are unwilling to use safari (or icloud, photos) because of privacy concerns.

If you stay in the "regular" apple workflow everything is fine: iphone camera -> icloud/photos (airdrop/photos) -> safari. If you deviate at certain points though the workflow breaks down. Whose fault is that?

Well, I disagree. I think "media competence" is more important than spelling or grammar and should be something expected of someone entering tertiary education.

>I agree, when It's part of the subject in test. I don't see any reasonable cause for a student to have to know about file types to submit a test, if that test isn't about file types. I don't, for example, expect my doctor to know how to convert an image file because that's not his job.

Understanding the conditions of your test is part of the test. And your doctor doesn't have to know. His toolchain forces him to use certain programs and settings. If anything is set up wrong, your MRI image is just a worthless CD-R.

>This highlights the level of knowledge the users of this application have in this area. The developers should have made it Painfully Clear that uploading directly from an iPhone isn't supported.

They did. The supported file formats were clearly stated. Your issue here is with apple.

>I agree they should learn this stuff, but don't think it should cost them their grade to do so.

It doesn't. They can retake the test without punishment.

>Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't increase public understanding of these "slightly-technical" topics but I think we're a long way off and we can't expect that understanding just yet.

I disagree. The sooner people learn that renaming a file does not constitute conversion the better. When I was a student 15 years ago it was painfully clear you could not upload the 50MB .tif file your scanner spat out (silly websites at the time would just not take 50MB uploads most of the time...). I think this "slightly-technical" knowledge is something akin to correct spelling and grammar. It's fine if you disagree but, in my opinion (even if that was not the intent of the college board), this is not a bad lesson to teach.

You're still supporting that computer knowledge of what image file formats are and how to convert them should be part of the test. They can learn that later when their high school or college makes them take basic computer classes (hopefully), right now they just want to upload their image.

Either Apple or College Board is at fault here but it isn't the user.

But that's not what the test is about. It's not a category on the test.

What an embarrassment. Just let the students upload whatever file, run it through imagemagick on the backend and convert to JPEG or PNG. If the output if garbage then shoot them an email.

It's not an explicit category on the test and I never debated that. It might be an implicit requirement though.

Just how when you take your drivers test you should actually be able to operate your vehicle and know the laws around operating a motor vehicle aside from the explicit knowledge required from you in the test. But I understand how this might be a foreign concept for someone from the US.

Yes, if you want to use a cell phone and/or a computer to complete your tasks you should have some basic knowledge about how it operates.

You can shift responsibility for that knowledge wherever you want but I would say that at the age between 16 and 19 (which google tells me is the average age for AP classes) I would expect that knowledge from someone applying for AP credit. And if someone didn't know what the accepted file types (as stated in the FAQ) meant at that age I'd expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Well, I suppose you’re welcome to have whatever bizarre opinions you like, but you should recognise that they’re pretty fringe.

No, this isn’t something the average person should need to know about.

Note that many students take many of these tests, even dozens, so $100/test is quite a lot for what is usually a few hours sit down in a big room with a handful of proctors for hundreds of students (i.e., no more expensive to run than a typical university intro-level class final with a professor and some student TAs).

Google Photos syncs HEIF/HEIC to their cloud.

> But I understand how this might be a foreign concept for someone from the US.

What? In the US, knowing how to operate your vehicle and the laws around operating a motor vehicle IS the drivers test.

Your argument is not reasonable. Knowing the nuances of file formats is irrelevant to AP exams in US History, Calculus, Physics, etc. This is a failure of the administrators to make a proper test. The College Board specializes in tests- that's what they do, and they screwed up.

A (high school) student who's unwilling to use Safari because of privacy concerns but would be ok using Chrome? That sounds like a serious edge case.

Some of the issues seems to be because some of these students transferred the HEIC file to their computers then tried to upload them by changing the extension of the file.

I'm unsure that any of these students wanted to take their AP exams on their phone or computer. That this is a new problem suggests that this is something they've been newly forced to deal with.

It's certainly not a well engineered user experience. Passing a physics test should require physics knowledge, not knowledge of image formats. I think understanding of image formats is actually fairly obscure outside of technical circles.

Sadly, it's not. I've had lots students who would use the Opera VPN or one of the "free" anti-virus providers VPNs because they got sold (by adds or dumb friends) that it would be safer.

You seriously over-estimate the "tech-savviness" of the average student and that really is part of the issue I'm pointing out here.

You’re vastly overestimating the competence of the average computer user. There’s a sizeable minority of people out there that don’t know what file extensions are, and even if they do know about them, they might not understand how they work (hence students attempting to convert file types by changing the extension).

File extensions are an implementation detail that, ideally, end users should never be forced to think about. There are graceful solutions to this problem; the College Board just didn’t do their due diligence.

The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.

Maybe they should just pay the $5 fee...

If the iPhone took pictures in webp format, exactly the same thing would have occurred. College board doesn’t accept that either despite it being open.

I can confirm. The average graduating high school senior or first-year college student is woefully inept at technical tasks. They grew up with tablets and smart phones, but outside the common apps, they aren't any more tech-savvy than anybody else.

Source: I work in tech for higher ed.

Do I really need to explain that if I upload a file to Dropbox or iCloud it's still not on the web site form where I want it?

webp is also possibly patent-encumbered. At least if you ask various members of the MPEG-LA.

The only safe format for photo-like content remains JPEG probably for decades to come

By default, both Windows and MacOS hide file extensions. Smart phones almost universally hide them, if they give you a file explorer at all.

I suspect most teenagers (and that's what we're talking about here - 17, 18 years olds finishing secondary school) would have a notion that jpg and gif are image formats, and pdf and dcx are a document formats. I suspect few would know much beyond that, and most would not have had much reason to worry about converting between formats. [I work in higher ed tech, my gut feeling here is based on performing usability testing of other software]

Add in an unexpected file format glitch during the most important test of their life? Yeah, I'm not at all surprised that some/many screwed up.

This is 100% on College Board for failing to handle the situation gracefully. They didn't need to accept heif files. They did need to provide detailed instructions ahead of time, including possible issues with unsupported formats.

I'm not overestimating them. I see lots of college admission files, I know how inept most high school graduates are. I would like to see a higher base standard because frankly these issues are not going away for them and I don't see it as a tertiary education issue. 3 to 6 years later they will still have to submit resumes and portfolios and they will suck at it but the places they submit these to now longer offer any grace periods. File size to large? Fuck you. Wrong file type? Fuck you. Unsigned PDF? Fuck you. Missing a document? Fuck you. Missed a dead line? Fuck you.

> I suspect few would know much beyond that, and most would not have had much reason to worry about converting between formats.

Ok, first of, why should I (as an institution) care about the people unable to fulfil the conditions of my test? Maybe I only want people with a basic understanding of file formats because chances are they will have less issues with future applications?

> They did need to provide detailed instructions ahead of time, including possible issues with unsupported formats.

They send out a message a week before the tests. The website only accepted the allowed formats. You could complain about them using Twitter to send out that message but you are not.

> They didn't need to accept heif files. They did need to provide detailed instructions ahead of time, including possible issues with unsupported formats.

They did not accept .heic files (see the source from the upload js file). They did provide a list of supported files. Maybe the handholding should stop at some point?

No one rational feels sorry for universities.

Yes. Your average user knows nothing of file types. They know about pictures. Ask your average iPhone users whether their pictures are stored as JPEG, HEIC or TIFF files and you'll get a blank stare most of the time.

No one rational makes absolute comments on the internet.

Maybe university IT departments are staffed by people. Maybe even at the college board it's just some IT guys trying to keep a shitty platform working. Maybe they did the best they could working within their constraints and they expected the same from students who have a vested interest in getting their results submitted. Maybe this is just much ado about nothing.

Ever see a student get scolded for not using a #2 pencil? Can't use a pen. Can't use a marker. Can't use a #9 pencil. Must be a a #2 pencil.

Ever fill out a government form that must be done in non erasable black or blue ink. A pencil is unacceptable. A red pen, green pen, purple pen is unacceptable. An erasable pen is also unacceptable.

Not saying users should have to know what a .JPG from an .HEIC but just saying there is plenty of precedent of technical requirements for things in real life. I've had forms rejected at the immigration office for using the wrong type of pen an I've been in classes where students didn't have the correct type of pencil and caused issues.

Mobile uploading is often broken or inconvenient. Phone to sync service (such as dropbox or icloud) to desktop with a full functioning browser to upload. This doesn’t seem like an edge case to me. I’d expect uploading directly from a phone to be an edge case. Most people don’t want to waste time filling out forms with a touchscreen when they have a mouse and keyboard handy.

I'm pretty damn technical and I never heard of HEIC before today. Maybe I would have if I had an Iphone, but in general if I take a photo with my phone I assume it writes a JPEG to the file system somewhere. If that's not the case, the software -- not the students -- should have been able to handle the issue. Computers are the servants of people; not the other way around.

ok but what if you're told this 'technical requirement' in a tweet while taking the test? and you don't even use twitter?

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It just makes the thread even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Only native apps that explicitly opt-in to HEIC support.

> Ok, first of, why should I (as an institution) care about the people unable to fulfil the conditions of my test?

Maybe you (as an institution) care about all your students?

I don't see why you'd assume that the students did anything less than their best.

It's not the institution giving the test. It's a for-profit corporation that has a de facto monopoly on standardized testing in the US. It's also a company who has been slow to modernize their test (both content, scoring, and process) and has slowly lost the faith of many colleges/unis. And the students are paying for the "privilege" because their test is the gateway to higher ed.

The at-home test format is new. It's usually given in a test center (either private or at the secondary school) with a proctor. Students usually prep for years for this exam, but all that prep would be for the on-site proctored exam. This was new for everybody, and appears to be poorly executed by the company that profits handsomely from these exams.

Based on the article linked, the message went out the day of the exam, after some students were already mid-test. That's not helpful.

For their threat model, they could be right - they could be successfully defending against school network surveillance and/or censorship.

#2 pencils are standard student equipment. As are iPhones.

And government forms also come with pens to fill them out.