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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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