I’ve registered for my CKA exam next week, and I have a question regarding my current setup, I have an external monitor on my desk infront of me without webcam and beside it is my laptop which is opened, connected to monitor through HDMI and it has a webcam, my question is that I want to use my external monitor but I don’t have an external camera, so can I turn my laptop screen off and just use its camera? (Change from extended mode to Second screen only). Note that the laptop is on the side so I won’t be facing directly to the camera because I will be working on my external monitor which is infront of me.
I hope I clarified what is my question and doubt. Best!
If you can borrow an external webcam with a long lead, it will be easiest to get through what the proctor will ask you to do to verify you’re in a proper setting for taking the exam. The proctor will ask you to pan over the entire room, ceiling to floor, to make sure you don’t have anything hidden that would be unfair (say, somebody who could whisper out answers to you, a magic tech support monkey, who knows what they look for). This might be hard to do with a laptop that is tethered via an HDMI cable to your monitor.
It also depends whether you’re using a windows or a macintosh laptop, since if it’s a Mac, I don’t think you’d be able to use the webcam and the external monitor while using the Mac clamshelled, as you’d need to do. I have never taken an LF exam with a Windows laptop, so you’d need to check with someone who has to tell you if you could manage this in the configuration you describe.
You might want to look at our Community FAQ, which has a lot of useful info as to what you can and can’t do during the exam. If that isn’t clear, I can beckon some of my Windows-using colleagues and they can give you their ideas on this.
If you can scan the entire room, floor to ceiling, and around and under your desk, then you can do it with the laptop camera. But I think you’ll find an external webcam easier to manage, nonetheless.
Hi @smadixd, I am in a similar situation right now where I need to use an external monitor along with the laptop’s camera, can you please share your experience and if this setup worked for you?
The documentation of the exams says that you can’t use that, because using your laptops camera will open your computer screen, and having two screens are not permitted.
Some tricky stuff from clever people will be to disable the laptops display by editing config files, but having the scenario were you have you laptop open and another display is also forbidden. So you only options are to buy a cheap webcam or just do it in your laptop (Not recommended)
Hello, During my CKA I didn’t have an external camera which wasn’t acceptable, so I had to take exam on my laptop, during my CKS exam I brought an external camera and was able to take the exam on my 24 inch monitor but ofcourse you have to change the screen settings to “Second screen only”.
Actually, I took the CKA and CKS exams while having 3 monitors: the laptop’s and 2 external monitors. Both proctors did not object to that, because I had disabled the laptop’s screen as well as one of my external monitors.
When you launch the PSI Secure Browser, it validates that there is only one active monitor.
First time, for my CKA exam, I could not use my brand new Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, the PSI Secure Browser did not recognize my screen. I had to boot to Windows 11 (which I rarely do). The PSI docs does say that only Ubuntu LTS is supported, not its variants.
Second time, on Monday for the CKS exam, I used Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and the PSI Secure Browser worked perfectly.
It’s pretty easy to disable monitors in both OSes. It’s just a checkbox in the OS parameters.
I have no webcam on my laptop so I already had an external webcam. I could have used another laptop I have, but PSI recommends disabling the internal webcam if we intend to use an external one, and in Linux, that’s not so easy.