Ollama vs ChatGPT - Going Offline During Exams
Some proctored exams block all network egress except the proctor's endpoints. ChatGPT obviously fails in that environment. Ollama, running entirely on your Mac, does not. The trade-off is answer quality; the gain is reliability under hostile network conditions.
A proctored exam app may install a network-policy profile that blocks outbound connections to known AI endpoints (chat.openai.com, claude.ai). When that happens, ChatGPT in the overlay shows a connection error. Ollama does not depend on the network at all - prompts and answers route through localhost only. The downside is that on a typical M1 Mac, a 7B model is roughly GPT-3.5 quality, not GPT-4. For most homework explanations that's adequate; for hard problems it isn't. If your exam policy blocks AI endpoints aggressively, Ollama is the fallback.
Download from ollama.com, run installer, then `ollama pull mistral` from Terminal. Five minutes total. Run `ollama serve` to start the local server.
Configure the overlay URL to http://localhost:11434/ or use the built-in Ollama mode if your version supports it.
Yes - LLM inference is GPU-heavy. Plug in for exams longer than 90 minutes.
Need reference access during your exam?
Fracture runs a native floating overlay that sets the macOS window privacy flag. It is 100% excluded from screen capture feeds, window lists, and proctor recordings.