In my program, we had classes (6.033 http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/ http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/, I'm looking at you) with tasks that practically required you t

In my program, we had classes (6.033 http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/ http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/, I'm looking at you) with tasks that practically required you to use *NIX systems, know how to open LaTeX'd Postscript files, install open source libraries from tar files, etc. before you graduated. It's not that those things were explicitly the point of the assignments; it's that those things were simply part of the requisite yak shaving for successfully completing the real tasks.