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Playback mode

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During an interview, the Interview platform keeps track of every keystroke of every participant within a pad. 

Once the interview has been ended, interviewers can replay the entire interview. This is useful to review a candidate’s solution, write up feedback and also to share the interview session with other teammates.

⚠️Only code changes on the left window will be shown in the playback. Any code run in the shell (like REPL commands or package installations) will not be displayed in playback mode.

How to access Playback Mode

There are two ways to view playback in the pad.

1. The pad will automatically transition to Playback Mode once the interviewer clicks End Interview.

Playback mode screen with an arrow pointing to the play button in the control bar.
Playback Mode. Start playback with the “play” button in the top track, or choose one of the other participant tracks.

2. It’s also available in the Pads List after the interview has been ended:

A pads list with an arrow pointing to the playback button of a specific pad row.

Using Playback Mode

Playback mode displays a separate track for each participant in the pad to clearly highlight individual code edits and runs.

You can review the playback for each participant by using the “expand arrow” (1) and then selecting the participant (3) for which you’d like to view the playback. The top progress bar (2) represents the progress for the selected participant:

Playback mode screen with a 1 next to the collapsible arrow on the control bar, a 2 next to the control bar itself, and a 3 next to the different users involved in the playback.

When playback first loads, the top progress bar (2) will display by default the participant with the most code edits.

The track will follow active edits for that participant. Other participants’ edits may show up in the background, but if the active participant is not making any edits, we automatically fast forward through all other edits. To change focus to a different participant’s edits, click on their track to switch.

You can use your mouse to click or drag the slider on any of the progress bars to skip forward or backward in the playback. Alternatively you can use your arrow keys to move forward or backward as well.

Next to the slider for each individual in the pad you’ll see:

  • Edits – Equivalent to a couple keystrokes, depending on typing speed.
  • Runs – The number of times the participant ran their code to produce output.

Other controls to be aware of:

  1. Back Button – skips back 5 edits
  2. Speed Control – can adjust playback speed from 1x-8x
Playback mode screen with a 1 next to the rewind button and a 2 next to the playback speed multiplier.

✅ With the new tabbed UI, The playback will automatically switch between tabs and/or files in the order that they happened in the interview.

Copy-paste detection

Pasting events from sources outside the pad are highlighted to assist you in detecting potential cheating.

In the playback bar you’ll see a yellow dot every time a user has copied content from a source outside the pad — when you hover over it you’ll see a Code pasted message pop up:

The playback menu is shown. The progress bar is magnified where the mouse hovers over a yellow button with the "code pasted" pop up shown.

You can click on that yellow dot to jump to the paste event to evaluate it to see if it meets your criteria for cheating.

⚠️ Pasted code does not always equal cheating. While it could be from sources like StackOverflow or ChatGPT, they could also simply be code that a candidate has been working on in their own IDE or editor like Notepad++.