Right, the lack of standardization seems more a problem than a lack of any performance metric at all. "Show and tell" style assignments (or fewer larger projects) in which people describe all of the fun geeky things they did seem like they would work reasonably well in that sort of model, but this would be hard enough to compare against other students in the same class, much less across schools or districts.

But it may even be possible to keep the standardized tests and just alter the nature of the day to day assigned work. Most of the really bright people we're talking about here would probably do well on them regardless. But then havoc gets raised if the numbers start to slip at all, even if the result is truly a more educated student body, people demand that the system become more proactive in addressing the "problem", and the system is back at square one...

To perform an assay, the doctor only has to place the relevant substances (reagents, etc) into the cartridge and the test then takes place automatically

By the time you're going to a doctor you may as well get the sample drawn in the doctor's office or a lab. Until you can perform "over the counter" tests with it, it's useless in the home.

1/3 of the time letting my students "run wild", applying what they had learned, and generally just screwing around and LEARNING stuff. No, not the stuff on the checklist.

If this was a year before college where students could just play, use what they had learned, create things, and explore the world, then it would be FANTASTIC! We'd be producing some really amazing scientists and engineers.

Bingo! Someone else who gets it. The message we're sending right now is "if you're smart we're going to make you work harder" when it should be closer to "Hey, look at how cool this is! Try it out! I can tell you more about it if you're interested..."

Seriously, lots of intelligent people have this amazing propensity to learn about stuff on their own and many have fun doing it. As educators we should be assisting them in this mission rather than trying to brutally suppress their interests in favor of some canned curriculum.

This article is misleading, suggesting that any old magnetic field can alter someone's morality.

In reality, transcranial magnetic stimulation temporarily disrupts part of the brain. It can blind you, cause you to lose feeling in parts of your body, or cause temporary aphasia (not the sort of thing you'd generally like to be subject to given that we don't understand exactly how functions are localized within the brain). All that this demonstrates is that it can alter one's ability to reason out a person's morality as well. This is not necessarily even a specific response - for all we know it could be disrupting the subjects' ability to empathize with the characters or understand the story altogether.

It is however somewhat interesting that the behavior elicited when the TMS was applied became more utilitarian than deontological - one philosophy is not necessarily better than the other. I'd question whether their morality was impaired at all. Perhaps it was the morality they had been conditioned to accept that was disrupted. The "memory" of their moral training, so to speak.