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Comment by _snsh | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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