A purple screen as an anti-cheat feature

When there are too many people in the cohort of students I must grade, I resort to an automatically graded challenge.

In this particular case, the challenges were written in Go, using Charm, accessible through SSH. The code is not publicly available to prevent students from accessing it before the exam, but if you are a teacher I'll gladly share it, just ask me.

This particular challenges were meant to be solved without access to notes, to the internet, or to a LLM.

As I can't exactly ascertain what the students are doing given their number and the size of the room, I made the screen background purple and told the student to run their terminal emulator fullscreen, and that anybody with a not-purple screen would be immediately marked as cheating, no warning.

As far as I'm aware, it worked.

Side note: if you care about color calibration and thought about writing colorful terminal applications, look at the range of colors displayed on the students' screen and weep.