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.