Lockdown browsers excel at failing to prevent cheating

October 7, 2020 — by Rohan Kumar
Screen Shot 2020-10-01 at 3

The only thing lockdown browsers inhibit is student sanity.

I wasted 20 minutes of my life downloading College Board’s SecureTestBrowser, a supposedly foolproof anti-cheating desktop application for  AP Biology tests. Although it blacks out one of my two monitors every time I open it, I can’t visit other tabs, paste text from my clipboard or take screenshots — it does its job, at the very least.

Or so I thought, until Ms. Lenz told us to install the app Remind on our phones so we could communicate with her during the test. Now hold up just one second, I think I’ve had a breakthrough. If I can communicate with Ms. Lenz during a test with my phone, that still leaves open the rather large loophole that a potential cheater could communicate with fellow students in this way. 

Apparently whoever had the brilliant idea of inventing a lockdown browser had no friends to text in his life, which explains why he spent his time making a Google Chrome knockoff that ruins my beautiful dual-monitor setup.

Here’s a suggestion for College Board: Just use a normal browser. They’re just as secure (and a lot more monitor-friendly).

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