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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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 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?

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.

> 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?

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.