.  Forget credit hours - in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.  MANCHESTER, Mich. - Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.  Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor's in accounting. When she feels she's mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she's competent - by getting the equivalent of a B - she passes and moves on to the next subject.  T