The lockdown browser was a reasonable idea in about 2012. Stop the candidate opening a second tab, disable copy-paste, block the print screen key, and you have closed off the obvious ways to look something up mid-exam. For a while, that was most of the threat.

It is not the threat anymore. And a control that solved an old problem can quietly give you false confidence about a new one.

What lockdown actually controls

A lockdown browser governs one process: itself. It can refuse to lose focus, suppress shortcuts, and complain when a virtual machine is detected. All of that happens inside the browser's own sandbox. It is genuinely good at making the exam window behave.

The problem is that the interesting cheating no longer happens inside that window. It happens beside it, or underneath it, or on a different device entirely — places the browser has no visibility into by design.

Where the threat actually went

The current generation of assistance tools does not fight the lockdown browser. It ignores it. An overlay that renders answers on screen while excluding itself from screen capture does not need a second tab — it sits on top of your locked-down exam and is invisible to the recording the proctor reviews. We walked through that mechanism in detail in the exam is over, the cheating just got smarter.

A second phone running an audio-to-answer assistant does not touch the candidate's exam machine at all. Neither does a person in the next room. The lockdown browser is securing a building while the side door has been replaced with open air.

Locking the browser harder does not help when the cheating was never inside the browser in the first place.

It also costs you something

This matters because lockdown is not free. It demands installs, breaks on managed laptops, fails on Linux and older hardware, and turns accessibility tooling into a support nightmare. Screen readers and magnifiers — the assistive software some candidates depend on, covered by standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — are exactly the kind of "other software touching the screen" a strict lockdown is built to block. You end up excluding honest candidates to inconvenience cheats who were never going through the browser.

What to lean on instead

Lockdown is fine as one thin layer. It just cannot be the layer. The controls that hold up against the current threat live elsewhere:

  • Capturing what the candidate truly sees, before any tool can hide from the recording — the approach behind OroLink.
  • Assessment design that makes a looked-up answer worth little, which we cover in designing exams that resist AI.
  • Cross-session analytics that surface organised behaviour no single proctor would notice.

Keep the lockdown browser if it buys you a small honest-candidate deterrent. Just stop treating it as the wall. The wall is somewhere else now.