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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> 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.