Does LockDown Browser Record You? What Respondus Actually Captures
LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor are two different products, and only one of them turns on your camera. What each captures, whether your screen is recorded, whether a phone beside you is caught, and how to tell which one your exam is using before it starts.
Short answer. LockDown Browser on its own does not record you. It locks the machine down: no other tabs, no other applications, no copy and paste, no printing. Respondus Monitor is a separate add-on, and that one does use your webcam and microphone and records the session for later review. Most of the confusion online comes from people answering about one product while asking about the other.
Two products, one name
Instructors enable these separately, and an exam can use either or both.
| LockDown Browser | LockDown Browser + Monitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Blocks other tabs and applications | Yes | Yes |
| Disables copy, paste, print, right-click | Yes | Yes |
| Uses your webcam | No | Yes |
| Records audio | No | Yes |
| Records your screen | Not by default | Yes, on recent versions |
| Reviewed by a human afterwards | No | Often, for flagged moments |
| Requires a room or ID scan | No | Sometimes, if the instructor enables it |
If your exam only requires LockDown Browser, nothing about you is being filmed. The software is a restricted browser, not a camera. If Monitor is enabled, the session is recorded and stored, and the recording outlasts the exam.
How to tell which one you are about to sit
You do not have to guess. The startup sequence tells you:
- Monitor is on if you are taken through a webcam check before the quiz begins: a preview of yourself, a microphone test, sometimes a photo of your student ID and a scan of the room. That whole sequence exists only when recording is enabled.
- LockDown Browser alone drops you straight into the exam after closing blocked applications, with no camera step at all.
A webcam indicator light that comes on during the startup check and stays on is the plainest signal there is. If the exam begins and no camera step ever happened, Monitor is not running.
What Monitor actually does with the recording
Monitor is not a live human watching you. The session is recorded, then software reviews the video and flags moments: a face leaving the frame, a second face appearing, sustained gaze away from the screen, audio in the room, unusual movement. Those flagged moments are queued for the instructor, who sees a timeline with the flags marked and can jump to each one.
Two things follow from that design, and both matter.
First, a flag is not a finding. Flagged moments are extremely common and mostly innocent. Looking away to think, a housemate walking past, a cough, poor lighting. The instructor decides what any of it means, and most flags are dismissed without a word to the student.
Second, the recording persists. Unlike a quiz log, which is a handful of timestamps, this is video that can be reviewed weeks later if something else raises a question. We wrote about how these reviews actually play out in ProctorU, Respondus and Honorlock.
Can it detect a phone?
The software cannot see your phone. It runs on the exam machine and has no way to inspect a separate device sitting on your desk.
The camera can, and this is the distinction people miss. LockDown Browser alone will not catch a phone. Monitor will not detect the phone as a device either, but it records video that a human or a flagging model may notice a phone in, and reaching for one produces exactly the kind of repeated downward glance and hand movement that gets flagged. A room scan, when enabled, is specifically there to establish that no second device is present at the start, which turns a phone appearing later into a documented contradiction.
So: undetectable as hardware, very visible as behaviour. We went through the same distinction for Canvas itself in Can Canvas Detect Cheating on Your Phone?.
What about browser extensions?
They do not load. LockDown Browser is a separate application, not your Chrome profile, and it does not run your extensions. This is not a detection question at all. There is nothing running to detect, because the software you installed in Chrome is simply not present in that environment.
That applies to every extension, ExamClutch included. Any tool advertising that it works under lockdown browsers is either describing a different product or lying. We laid out what runs where in Browser Lockdown and Exam Security.
Practical things that go wrong, and what to do
Most student problems with Respondus are technical rather than disciplinary:
- The check fails on your webcam. Close every other application that might hold the camera, including video call software running in the background.
- A housemate walks through the frame. Nothing to do about it afterwards. It gets flagged, it gets dismissed. Do not email your professor in a panic about it.
- The exam crashes mid-session. Reopen it immediately and email your instructor with the time. A gap you reported yourself reads very differently from one you did not.
- Poor lighting flags you repeatedly. Face a light source rather than sitting with a window behind you.
More of these, plus the Canvas-side failures, are in Canvas Exam Troubleshooting.
Know which exam you are taking
The single most useful habit is checking, before exam week, which of your assessments are proctored and which are ordinary browser quizzes. They are completely different situations with completely different rules, and students routinely plan for the wrong one. We compared them directly in Unproctored vs. Proctored Online Exams.
For the proctored ones, there is no tooling answer. Preparation is the only thing that works.
For the unproctored ones
ExamClutch is built for ordinary browser quizzes, the kind you take in normal Chrome with no lockdown and no camera. It reads the question straight from the page, gets the answer, and applies it with a double-click, so you never leave the quiz tab and never produce the page-exit events that quiz logs record.
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, Schoology, McGraw Hill and Google Forms, across multiple choice, multi-select, dropdown and fill-in-the-blank. It fills the answer in and leaves the submitting to you. And it is honest about the boundary above: under LockDown Browser, nothing in Chrome runs at all.
- Install the Chrome extension
- Try the demo quiz first, no pairing code needed
- See pricing, weekly plan if you only need it for one exam week
Related reading
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