Does your staff normally work on locked down laptops? IMHO, this is a good way to find candidates who are good at working on locked down laptops, and ones who are good at passing tests.

Good point, although there is always some tension between "testing methodology" and "real-world relevance" in any scenario where it is (percieved as) necessary to 'weed out' losers from winners. One way to look at it: people implement tests for various reasons, sometimes the reason is "because that's the way we've always done it, and its worked well enough so far".

Considering that history creates its own 'momentum' that might also be why a particular shop uses perl only, and why a particular boss might say "solve the problem this way" ... there is always more than one way to skin a cat, but being flexible might enable you to skin it in ways that won't freak out your boss, or require someone to totally redo their testing methodology.