Secure Testing Mode: Integrity Without Extra Software
You design a quiz, you write the questions, you grade the results — and the whole time, in the back of your head, you're wondering how many of your students just had Gemini open in a sidebar. It's an awful feeling. With v1.3.0, we built Secure Testing Mode for exactly this. No proctoring service, no clunky browser lockdown extension, no IT ticket. Just a single toggle on your assignment that quietly handles the cheating most online quizzes can't see.
What It Watches For
When Secure Testing Mode is on, four things start working the moment a student opens the quiz:
Every time a student navigates away from the quiz — switching tabs, minimizing, alt-tabbing — it's logged, and a warning shows when they come back. The count carries over even if they close the browser and reopen it.
Pasting into answer fields is blocked. Keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus too. Every answer has to be typed, with no way to drop in text from a translator or AI tool.
Browser AI assistants like Google Gemini open as a docked sidebar — they don't count as a tab switch and most quiz tools have no idea they exist. Lingua catches them anyway, and shows a clear warning the moment one opens.
The back button is disabled. Students can't just click away mid-quiz. If they truly need to exit, there's an Emergency Quit button — which is also logged.
The AI Sidebar Problem — Finally Solved
Here's the thing most online quiz platforms haven't caught up to yet: browser-native AI assistants like Gemini don't open a tab. They live in a panel inside the same window. Old-school tab-switch detection doesn't see them at all. So you've got students taking a "secure" quiz with an AI tutor literally watching their screen.
Lingua catches it. The moment a sidebar opens, a full-screen warning takes over the quiz to make it absolutely clear: we know it's there, and it's been logged. This protection is on across every student input page, not just in Secure Testing Mode.
Why this matters right now
Most online assessment tools were built before browser-integrated AI became normal. We're one of the first platforms to actively flag this kind of in-browser assistance — and your students don't have to install anything for it to work.
Transparency Beats Surveillance
Students in Secure Testing Mode see a dark header at the top of the page that says clearly: this quiz is being monitored. When something gets flagged, they get a warning that tells them exactly what was detected. This is on purpose. Research is pretty clear that students who know they're being monitored are far less likely to cheat than students who don't. The goal here isn't to catch kids — it's to make the honest path the easiest path.
Nobody wants to be the teacher who plays gotcha. This way, you don't have to.
What You See Afterward
Every secure-mode submission comes back with tab switch and emergency quit counts alongside the actual answers and score. We don't penalize anyone automatically — that's your call. But the data is there. A perfect score with five tab switches is a very different conversation from a modest score with none. Now you have the information to decide which conversation is worth having.
Honest about what it does
Secure Testing Mode eliminates the most common in-browser cheating moves — tabbing out for a translator, pasting in an answer, running a Gemini sidebar. It doesn't stop a student with a second device next to them. No software does. What it does do is make the quiz a fair, accurate measure of what your students actually know for the overwhelming majority of cases. And it does it without making you install anything new.