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.

> 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.

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.

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?