AP US History students panicked in April when iMovie crashed, deleting several students’ edits and preventing them from being able to fully complete their assignment.

About half of the APUSH students lost their work, according to teacher Sister Jeanne Marie Vanderlinde. “There were about five groups for every class, and I would say that at least two out of the five groups per class had a disaster on their hands,” said Sister Jeanne Marie.

The iMovie crash affected the students who were still using it to edit their clips and photos for the project. “The only groups that weren’t affected were the ones that got their movies to iTunes or CDs,” said S. Jeanne Marie.

Some of the affected students were able to salvage their clips to show the class, but a small minority lost all of their clips. “They had to stand up in front of the class and go through their project without showing the video. I checked with the tech department, but there was no way to salvage any of the edited clips,” said Sister Jeanne Marie.

The problem stemmed entirely from iMovie’s tendency to be temperamental, “iMovie is tricky,” said technology manager Nicholas Gamache. The initial complaints about the loss of clips made Sister Jeanne Marie wonder if it was simply an excuse, but after consulting with the tech department she found out what went wrong.

The affected students were disappointed by the crash because it happened the day before the assignment was due. “My group put in so much work in this project, and everything got deleted. All that time was wasted,” said junior Sian Last.

Sister Jeanne Marie doesn’t think that she will assign the project next year because of the inconvenience it caused to many students. “Technology can be wonderful, but only when it works,” said Sister Jeanne Marie.