These students are high school students. I'm very doubtful that this course covered material like file types and encoding. First year CS classes are almost exclusively programming basics and architecture.

This line of thinking only really makes sense if you presuppose that every person taking a computer science course in high school has an understanding of file types. Many don't have this knowledge. I don't see why students should need to have additional knowledge that is outside the scope of a course, just to pass the clase.

There's a reason these things are taught in a CS program, often at higher levels. And that's because they're not common knowledge.

She’s taking an exam. Surely she should understand these things by the end of the curriculum, right? I mean, she’s just been learning them... or should have.

Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time (late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as Turing machines, lambda calculus, decidability, computability, and the theory of recursive functions. I remember my exam required proving the identity between a particular integral and the Euler (not Riemann) zeta function and whether it could be evaluated in polynomial time to an arbitrary degree of approximation. We had to sketch out the algorithm that would do this in terms of pseudocode.

Trying to transcode a file by changing the extension... I dunno... it seems kind of meek.

Was that all covered by your first semester course? Because if so, that’s more impressive than a first semester course and MIT, CMU, or Harvard, let alone what a public school can offer.

That was covered by a two-year IB (International Baccalaureate) course in Computer Science running from 1997 until 1998. I attended a private school (the International School of Milan).

I don’t know the IB system, but AP tests are equivalent to testing students on a first semester college class. In computer science in the US, that means basic data structures and simple algorithms, and it’s been that way for the last thirty five years at least.

I generally don't like to say people are making things up, however there is a lot of mythology around how much work IB students do. I've frequently seen IB students while I was in undergrad boasting about their level of proficiency, despite it seldom being supported.

If you think I’m boasting about something from more than two decades ago, that’s your problem, not mine.

On windows when you change file formats between jpg png bmp it opens fine, so maybe it could be misleading? idk

The blame is as much on the OS manufacturers who haven’t implemented such an obvious and trivial UX workflow.

its not unheard that websites do only extension validation for uploads, worth a try!

That totally misses the point though, because if the website only validates on the basis of extension and accepts the format in an unrecognised format, the backend won’t know how to handle it anyway. There’s no point uploading a HEIC file disguised as a PNG (or whatever) if eventually somewhere along the workflow an examiner is actually going to have to open that file in a program that doesn’t know how to parse HEICs.

Perhaps the examiner’s program accepts HEICs and the frontend was unnecessarily limiting. Many systems are like that, and it’s frustrating that the College Board’s wasn’t.

The examiner’s client program is likely a browser that connects to a web-hosted system, and with the exception of Safari, other browsers do not (yet) handle HEIC natively nor even gracefully.