Is this for comment real? Why should being tech savvy enough to jump through esoteric technical requirements be part of the test?
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.
And government forms also come with pens to fill them out.
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.
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.
No, this isn’t something the average person should need to know about.
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.
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.
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.