Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwmoo740 | Hacker News Reader

They won't let you continue if their software detects a virtualized system. Source: I used ProctorU for remote exams with Georgia Tech.

I feel in that case, it was acceptable. Students were encouraged to get a cheap "burner" windows machine and use it only for the proctored tests, and we were warned in advance of all the restrictions.

View on HN

Seems a bit unreasonable to ask students (who likely already have tons of debt) to purchase an additional laptop just to take exams.

Yes, it does. On the other hand, though, you can get a cheap Windows laptop for less than some college text books.

Well, that's not saying very much, considering the whole thing with college text books. My last gaming rig literally cost less than my wife's textbooks last year.

Some universities loan students laptops for free for like a week.

You might be a bit out of date here. Textbooks are absurdly expensive these days relative to computers; Stewart's "Calculus" is $289[0], for example. That's about the right range for a new low end laptop or a used mid-range laptop.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/1285740629/

Perhaps. But 1) you can rent that book for a fraction of the price (Amazon currently shows it for ~$60) and 2) just because students have to pay for expensive books doesn't mean they have extra money to spend on a second computer.

Oh yeah that's standard procedure for an interview, "I got an interview this afternoon, better build a new machine"

Yeah as a student they gave us about a month warning.

Seriously? Was this a professional program or something? Maybe I was a particularly poor undergrad, but I can't imagine being able to afford a separate computer, even a shitty one, with a month's morning. Nor could I justify the expense -- "oh that's just my test-taking computer."

It didn't have to run any real software except a browser and maybe a PDF reader. Also, yeah it was a remote grad program, so it was a bit of an experiment with how you do testing remotely at scale. I think they were trying to reach a fair compromise that didn't involve rewriting course content to include more open exams.

If you could use a virtualbox I would be totally ok with this, the fact that they exclude exactly that makes it 10 fold shittier.

If you consider the purpose is to monitor the entire computer to see if you have notes pulled up, you can see why they have this requirement.

I thought the entire premise of proctorU and proctorTrack (which gatech is now using instead of proctorU) was ridiculous though. A cheap hdmi splitter and a long cable would be all you needed to pipe the test out to a second monitor in another room where someone could scoop up the whole test for later. Or maybe even feed back answers to some tiny headphones hidden behind the ear. Impossible to detect.

Pretty sure that guaranteed-detection of virtualization is currently an unsolved problem, or we'd be hearing about breakthroughs on the "is the universe a simulation?" question.

In principle you are correct; in practice the commonly-available emulation environments don't do anything to hide the fact that they're emulations. If you ask the OS for the name of the graphics card and get "VirtualBox Graphics Adapter for Vista and Windows 7"...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com