What the exam records about you

Your name, your student email address and your EPT ID come from your ALU registration. When you book a sitting we also store the date you chose and whether you are bringing your own laptop.

Recording starts when you begin a section and stops when you submit it. Each event is stored as a type and a timestamp:

• Leaving fullscreen.
• Switching away from the exam tab or window, and switching back. The gap between the two is kept as away time.
• Attempts to copy, cut or paste. These are blocked as well as recorded.
• Right-clicks, and the shortcuts Ctrl/Cmd+C, V, X and P, Print Screen and F12. Also blocked as well as recorded.
• A guess at whether a second screen is attached, made from your window and screen width. It is a heuristic and it is wrong often enough that staff are told to treat it as a question, not a finding.
• During the writing section only: your running word count, sampled at most once every 15 seconds. This records how fast the essay grew, never what it says.

The last 50 events of a sitting are submitted, along with up to 120 word-count samples.

There is no camera, no microphone and no screen recording. Nothing is captured from any other window or application. Your keystrokes are not logged; the writing section stores only the essay you submit and the word-count curve described above.

Three fullscreen exits, three tab switches or three copy-paste attempts in one section will submit that section automatically. You will see a warning before each of them.

A recorded event is a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict. Staff reviewing a sitting see the events and are expected to ask you about them before drawing any conclusion.

Your answers, your marks and your proctoring events are stored in the Writing Centre’s Google Sheets workbook. Writing Centre staff with an admin account can see them. Nothing is sold, shared with advertisers, or sent to any third party beyond Google, who host the storage.

Essays submitted for the writing section are sent to Cerebras for marking by a language model. The essay text goes; your name, email and EPT ID do not.

To see what is held about you, to correct it, or to ask why a sitting was flagged, write to thewritingcentre@alueducation.com. Say which sitting you are asking about.