Proctoring systems and Whisply

Proctoring software has grown into an ecosystem of overlapping browsers, kiosk shells, and behavioral monitors — each with a different bag of tricks for figuring out what else is running on a candidate's machine. Some rely on the OS-level window list. Others hook into screen-capture APIs. A few ship dedicated kernel-adjacent components that actively scan for suspicious processes. Confusingly, several use the same underlying components under different brand names, so guidance for one product rarely transfers cleanly to another.

The pages below are our honest, technical read on each. For every proctor we walk through: how the detection surface actually works, which macOS APIs it depends on, where the current Whisply overlay sits relative to that surface, and where the honest limits are. This is an educational reference — not a bypass guide, not a promise of invisibility, and not a substitute for reading your institution's academic-honesty policy.

A quick orienting note if you're not sure which one you're dealing with: proctoring products usually announce themselves at install time or on the first launch of the assessment. If you see a browser you didn't choose to open, a full-screen kiosk that refuses Cmd+Tab, or a webcam consent prompt, you're inside one of these products — and you'll want the corresponding page below.