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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.
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?
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.
Maybe you (as an institution) care about all your students?