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Exam proctoring Software Examplify incompatible with ARM

This would be kind of a bummer for a student who got their new Surface for school work. The company explicitly states “CPU Processor: Non-ARM-based processor supported by your operating system” as a requirement for Windows. On MacOS it’s fine though. This is the kind of incompatibility that I thought was mostly fixed, with remaining issues being legacy drivers for that old scanner. Apparently not!

6 comments

Comments (6)

dstrauss

Mar 21

What a crock, but I lay this at Nadella's doorstep. Either M$ wants Windows on ARM to be mainstream or not. Since the Lunar Lake SKU is overpriced business store fodder, my hope is M$ is trying to move ARM mainstream, but they need to be proactive about this and get business buy-in on ARM as well.

darkmagistric

Mar 21

My first thought that maybe it was similar to the Adobe CC not allowing the download of some software like Premier, just purely on base compatibility despite the fact the software itself would actually run under the prism emulator. Like if the software didn't run that system check, it would otherwise run fine.

But the fact that the error specifically mentions ARM would indicate maybe its for a different reason.

The ARM driver issue does extend to VPNs and Security Suites, maybe Exemplify uses some sort of embedded driver?

Edited

Dellaster

Mar 21

Replying to

I looked it up and apparently you can get a v3.6.3 update that works. Whether or not you’d be allowed to update the software likely depends on the proctoring situation.

I once had a proctored essay test at a local community college for an online course and had to get approval for changing the keyboard layout to Dvorak, since it was a locked-down device at the school. The hard part was explaining what “touch typing” and Dvorak were since my justification for the change was that I would never be able to type fast enough to finish in the time limit if I couldn’t use Dvorak. (I guess I'm handicapped by that. 🙀)

Eltos

Mar 02

That's crazy!

JoeS

Mar 02

Replying to

Right? I'm not sure how big this Examplify product is, but it's amazing that a mainstream product doesn't work with what is rapidly becoming a mainstream OS. I wonder if there's custom drivers to limit what students can do during an exam that make this hard to compile for ARM.

Dellaster

Mar 01

That’s a pretty big gotcha for those who buy a Surface Laptop Snapdragon for a college kid thinking it’s a smart choice. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Sometimes my sister asks about such things for her grandchildren and now I know to not recommend anything with ARM that’s not a Mac.