Tastefully borrowed from it :). It happens to be a pretty darn good question - it's a good place to talk about an accomplishment, and provides some insight into the intelligence, creativity, and personality of the person who answers it.

And this is why I prefer this kind of job posts: it sets up a 2 way communication. Like HN job posts used to be back in the day.

What are examples of this? Working around social systems? ie, as an example, the white South African student that applied for a bursary for African Americans in America?

If I were to apply, I'd use my senior year in high school (oh, so long ago). I registered for 7 college-level courses that I knew were all going to be taught during the same 2 blocks of time. That meant that I only had to "go to class" for two hours a day, and could spend the rest of my time doing whatever I wanted so long as I kept up with the material on my own time and agreed that my performance on the AP exams would be my entire grade. My result was a year of college credit, better grades than I'd ever gotten before and maybe a third of the workload of those in class.

If you didn't have to attend the classes in person, why did it matter that they were taught during the same 2 blocks of time?

I was supposed to. In my high school, it was very much the case that you'd go to class if you were enrolled. However, it was also very much not expected that someone would take the cross-section of courses I took, so scheduling didn't take that into account. The registrar was faced with the choice to either tell a star student to take "dumber" classes or to let me take courses on my own terms and check their scheduling more carefully in the future.