Wired
The rapid advancement of technology has greatly improved our daily lives. However, a group of high school students who uploaded photos taken by iPhone or iPad failed to pass the test because the test system was not compatible with the Apple HEIC photo format, and were forced to retake the university’s AP entrance exam. It is reported that this incident involves photos taken and uploaded by iPhones and iPads produced after 2017.
Foreign media TheVerge reported the story of California high school student Nick Bryner. After taking the handwritten answer and uploading it to the AP exam management website College Board, he and thousands of others encountered the same upload timeout bug. When the countdown is zero, these unlucky children will automatically be judged to have failed grades and will be informed that they can take the exam again within three weeks.
Follow-up investigations showed that the problem was with the iPhone and some newer Android smartphones. When students try to take photos in HEIC format with a higher compression ratio and upload them to the College Board website, they will encounter a timeout problem.
For mobile phone users, HEIC saves more storage space in the body or cloud disk, but unfortunately it has not been widely supported. The examination website College Board only supports pictures in JPG, JEPG and PNG formats, and cannot automatically convert HEIC to a compatible file format.
The University Council is currently working to help students submit answers correctly, and it claims that less than 1% of students encounter this problem. If you want to completely avoid this problem, you can also spend a few seconds to change the iPhone’s default photo format. The method is to open ‘Settings’, scroll down and click ‘Camera’, and then change the ‘format’ to ‘best compatible’ As a result, the phone will use the JPEG image format by default instead of the default HEIC.
It is reported that this format was first introduced by Apple in the 2017 iOS 11 update for iPhone and iPad. The University Council reminds that this problem cannot be solved by directly modifying the file extension.
