I am amazed at how far you tolerated it. This is probably how I would have handled it:
> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.
You have to really watch those interview red flags. They're super important.
I had one right out of college where the office (on energy efficient lightning) looked like some cubicle version of hell. A person in the elevator on the way to the interview mouthed "run away" to me, and really creeped me out.
I got the job, but literally couldn't even handle a full day in that cave-like godawful place.
Holy cow.. I've got an Amazon SRE headhunter sitting in my inbox right now. I am sorely tempted to decline and send a link to this article as reason why.
It gets worse -- when he wanted to leave the interview, the proctor couldn't disconnect those systems and kept making him wait until he finally gave up, cut off the call, and tried to purge it all himself.
That the electronic equivalent of preventing someone from leaving the building.
The clean your desk stuff is fine, but all of this should have been sent well ahead of the interview. Why they waste the time of two people to get ready for the interview is beyond me.
Yeah, I agree. Might have been willing to go through all that hassle. IF they had warned ahead of time the restrictions it might have been acceptable. I would pick another location, like the dining room or something, instead of having to 'clean' the desk. I tend to have an organized mess on my desk, and if I have to 'clean' it will drive me nuts for weeks. But, without heads up that is such a waste of time for everyone involved its crazy. And that's why it was the turning point for me.
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.
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.
You might be a bit out of date here.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.
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.
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 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"...
My thoughts exactly. If I was reeeeally invested in getting that job, I would have found another laptop lying around, and powerwashed it after I was done.
> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.
Nope. Goodbye.