AI Overlay for FairExam Proctoring on Mac
FairExam is one of the smaller Indian-built proctoring stacks used for vocational skills tests, recruitment screening, and certification exams across India and parts of Southeast Asia. Like most of the Indian assessment market, it leans on a browser-extension plus optional secure-browser pairing.
Indian proctoring vendors in the FairExam tier share a near-identical technical pattern: a Chromium or Firefox extension that requests tab and screen capture, a webcam stream for face checks, and optional human review on a back-end dashboard. None of these tools install a kernel extension on macOS, because Apple has not allowed third-party kernel extensions in a notarizable build since 2020 and System Extensions cannot intercept frame buffers either. That means FairExam, like its peers, reads what the browser hands it, and the browser reads what macOS hands the browser.
Key points
- FairExam-class proctors deliver as a browser extension; the extension cannot reach below the browser process to enumerate macOS windows directly.
- Webcam-based face and gaze checks read pixels from the camera, not from the screen, so the overlay has no influence on those signals.
- Audio analysis for second voices is independent of the screen layer; the overlay is silent and generates no acoustic flag.
- India-built proctors often optimize for low-bandwidth links by sending periodic snapshots rather than continuous video; the snapshots inherit the same window-privacy filtering.
How it works
┌── macOS host ─────────────────────────────────┐ │ ┌── Safari/Chrome ─────────────┐ │ │ │ ┌── proctoring extension ─┐ │ │ │ │ │ Browser screen-capture │ │ ← reads │ │ │ │ → exam recording │ │ visible │ │ │ └─────────────────────────┘ │ pixels │ │ └──────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │ │ ┌── LDBypass overlay ──────────┐ ← rendered │ │ │ ChatGPT / Claude / Ollama │ excluded │ │ └──────────────────────────────┘ from cap │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Compatibility on Mac
| macOS 14 Sonoma+ | Yes (required for window-privacy API) | ✓ |
| Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) | Native arm64 build | ✓ |
| Intel Macs (2019+) | Universal binary supported | ✓ |
| FairExam browser extension | getDisplayMedia honors window privacy | ✓ |
| FairExam human-review dashboard | Reviews pre-filtered captures | ✓ |
Common questions
Does FairExam record the entire screen or only the exam tab?
Most Indian browser-extension proctors offer both modes. Whichever is selected, the underlying capture goes through the same macOS API, and the flagged overlay window is excluded.
Will the overlay show up if FairExam takes periodic snapshots instead of streaming?
No. Snapshots are pulled from the same frame buffer the OS already filtered.
Can FairExam detect that I have a privacy-tagged window open?
macOS does not expose a list of privacy-flagged windows to third-party apps.
Does FairExam work on Mac at all?
Yes, the browser extension installs on Safari and Chrome on macOS. LDBypass behaves the same whichever browser the candidate uses.