At some point though it is obvious to the instructor that parroting the formula is what is required. At least, thats what my pre-calc instructor said many moons ago when I asked "why do i have to memorize this, i can do it in 3 or 4 lines of code in multiple programming languages".

Being weak at math and having been out of school for a long time I earned myself a decent grade by teaching myself the math for my pre-calc algebra,and statistics classes by treating them as almost an assembly type language with weird variable name requirements and other seemingly arbitrary limitations.

If course, if you can code, you can turn that programmable piece of hardware into a music maker, creative medium, etc....

Just plain sharks though, cause the Founding Fathers didn't think about mutherfsckin sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.

Maybe. But installing Debian on a VirtualBox machine and then setting up a quick-n-basic LAMP server can be done, especially if you give them really good documentation.

But doesn't IQ measure the *ability* to learn, not what body of knowledge someone has?

IE, if Einstein had an IQ of 190, but you gave him an exam about programming in Python, do you think he'd pass?

And so as it becomes yuppified and "me too!" and too popular, there will be a sub-sub-culture for the folks that really know what is going on and why they should be there.

The same has happened with Rainbow Gatherings, and will happen with events like DefCon.

population density, closeness to physical infrastructure, larger pool of qualified workers (maybe), etc.

A lot of those were donated

Yup. Even in the face-to-face Linux admin class I teach only 20% of the students grade comes from exams (one of which is a hands on skill exam for copying files, dealing with tar.gz and tar.bz2 files, moving files, looking at permissions, etc). Rest is lab work and projects.

A "properly" designed evaluation method is pretty cheat proof even if not proctored. Especially if you've been having your students move in that direction over the previous assignments.

Of course, designing such an assessment/evaluation is very hard to do, and grading it can be equally hard.

But, for those instructors that just want to give a 50 question multiple choice test from the text publisher's test bank, yeah, they need a proctor. There are a few online proctoring services that use webcams, etc. to monitor and most colleges/univsersities/military installations have testing facilities. I've even known instructors to accept a local parrish priest proctoring exams for a student taking her classes from Chihuahua, Mx (the college I work for is in Florida and is part of the state university system).

Still stand by my comment...

Lets look at the guy who mops the bathrooms at mcdonalds

Option one is to work at location A with manager A who is a real A hole. "Clock out for your bathroom breaks" or "I told you to do this 3 seconds ago why are you still here filling your water cup" or similar.

Same job, same pay, store B across town with manager B who simply says "You've been doing this for more than a week, you know the routine, you know what I expect of you I can pretty much leave you alone to do your job". Job still sucks, but it sucks less than at store A.

So... different job, different employer, etc. if you *really* dread going to work.

See this is why you retain copyright but give a permissive license like creative commons, etc.

If you dread going to work every day with no bright points, you really do need a different job or different employer.

For example, I have to deal with whiney instructors who don't follow directions, who check out completely 3 months of the year (and are proud of it), and who ignore emails or manage the work related messages they have after returning from 3 months off by saying "there were too many so I just deleted them all".

But, I also get to play in our teaching zoo, work on setting up webcams, experiment with the way a planetarium projects, influence lab exercises and projects the programming and networking students do, and teach Linux as an adjunct. Without all of this, the job really would suck.... but there is enough balance for me to enjoy it for the most part.

Spelled properly, just wrong grammar

Which is funny, because my health policy company (whatever BCBS in Florida is called this month - FloridaBlue I think?) sends me a statement every month of what was charged, what was paid, what I paid. And at the end of the year they send a nice summary for tax filing purposes. Heck, hte pharmacy the family uses - Publix - has a "year to date" on each receipt we get for prescriptions.... so, it obviously isn't impossible, or even too hard....