AI Overlay for MonitorEDU (Live Phone Proctor) on Mac
MonitorEDU is a hybrid proctor: a live human watches you over your phone's rear camera (positioned to view your face and screen from a distance), while a Mac app records the screen at the same time. The phone-camera angle is intentionally hard for software-only countermeasures to defeat.
MonitorEDU's value proposition is that the phone-camera angle catches things software-only proctors miss: a printed cheat sheet, a second device on the desk, eye drift toward an off-screen monitor. For an on-screen overlay, MonitorEDU's screen-recording app works the same as any other: ScreenCaptureKit on Mac filters out windows we flag private. The phone camera, however, is a separate physical sensor pointed at your physical monitor - software invisibility does not help. If your exam runs through MonitorEDU and the proctor is watching your screen via phone camera, the overlay will be visible in that camera frame.
Key points
- Two capture surfaces: a Mac screen-recorder (overlay invisible) plus a phone-camera live stream (overlay visible if pointed at the screen).
- The setup script directs you to angle the phone camera at the screen and your face; if you can frame just your face and exclude the screen, the overlay becomes useful.
- MonitorEDU is most common in graduate-program admissions tests and law-school finals; check your specific exam.
- If you cannot frame the camera away from the screen, the overlay does not solve the proctoring problem and we do not recommend depending on it.
How it works
┌── Mac screen ────────────────────────────────┐
│ ┌── exam app ──┐ ┌── overlay (hidden) ─┐ │
│ │ Q&A │ │ ChatGPT/Claude │ │
│ └──────────────┘ └─────────────────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
▲
│ physical pixels visible
│ to a camera pointed at it
│
📱 phone camera streams to proctorCompatibility 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 | ✓ |
| Mac screen-recording app | Honors window privacy | ✓ |
| Phone-camera proctor angle | Sees physical screen pixels | ✗ |
Common questions
Can I just point the phone camera at my face only?
Some MonitorEDU exams allow a face-only angle. If yours does, the overlay is fully invisible because the phone never sees the screen. Check your specific exam instructions.
Will dimming the overlay or making it transparent help?
No. A dimmed window is still pixels on the screen and still visible to a physical camera. The privacy flag is a software-level filter, not optical.
What about MonitorEDU's screen recording?
That is what the privacy flag protects against. The screen recording does not contain the overlay. Only the phone camera sees physical pixels.