It ran on a wall clock. An hour away from the tab spent an hour of the
exam on questions that were never shown, and every per-question figure
was a fiction — which is the number the whole analysis is built on.
Three things stop it now. The tab being hidden, which catches switching
away. An explicit pause. And, for the commonest case the other two miss
— the tab left open on the exam while the person is in another room —
an idle watch: three minutes with no mousemove, key, wheel, touch or
scroll and it asks "Still there?", with the clock already stopped by the
time the question appears. A stray pointer movement does not answer it;
somebody has to say they are there.
Three minutes, not one, and scrolling counts as activity: reading a long
vignette is minutes without a click, and interrupting genuine reading to
ask whether you are reading is worse than occasionally crediting a
minute nobody was there for.
The server was the other half. seconds_remaining computed from
started_at and total_time, so a paused client made no difference to what
the server thought was left. It reads the saved time_left now, which is
what the player decrements only while the exam is on screen, falling
back to the wall clock for progress saved before this existed.
And a five-minute warning, said once. An exam that ends without notice
is a scramble; one that nags is a distraction.
Reverts the exam-exit-submits rule from earlier in this branch, which
was built on the opposite premise and would have charged wall-clock time
and then graded an exam whose clock should simply have stopped. Leaving
suspends, in both modes, and the overview no longer promises a clock
that does not stop for a break.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
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