burned a CodeSignal GCA last month, recruiter sent me the proctoring report afterwards, here's what i learned about how does codesignal detect cheating
spent the past two weeks digging into how does CodeSignal detect cheating, not by choice. backstory: failed a GCA bad enough that my recruiter (genuinely no idea why) sent me the actual proctoring report afterwards. a friend of mine works in technical recruiting at a midsize fintech and we sat on a screen-share for an hour and a half going through the recruiter side of the dashboard, line by line.
the desktop process scan is way less exhaustive than i thought. catches stuff that registered a normal window with the OS, browser extensions especially, and visible second windows on screen share. anything that doesn't register a visible OS window, anything sitting outside the browser sandbox entirely, just doesn't end up in the report. my friend literally said "we scan for the obvious stuff and basically take the rest on faith."
screen recording isn't abstract, its a literal scrubable video file with the code typed alongside it timestamp by timestamp. recruiters can scrub through. focus_change events line up with what was typed at that exact second. tab_switch is the big one, anything past 2-3 in a 70 minute window flags for human review and most people fail that secondary look. the score might be passable, but the tab pattern alone gets you cut.
things in my report i didn't recognize: a "frame_drop" entry that im pretty sure is just network jitter being logged. a couple "mouse_left_window" markers that lined up with me looking at my coffee. some "focus_change" entries i couldn't tie to anything specific. recruiter side shows it as a heatmap timeline.
the company i bombed for, my recruiter said the score itself was the deciding factor, behavior was clean. small comfort lol. but i'd already gotten my second hard problem destroyed within 12 minutes of opening it so i wasn't surprised.
passed a different company's GCA two weeks later cleanly. different prep, different setup, leaving it at that.
posting this because i went looking for any of this info before my test and found mostly marketing pages. anyone else ever had a proctoring report sent back to them post-rejection? curious if HackerRank or Codility do the same thing or if codesignal is unusual in even letting recruiters see this much detail.