Accessing schedules with the Revit API

I appreciate you may have excitedly arrived here from a successful search on Google, wondering how you use the Revit API with schedules. Well I'm afraid its bad news. You can't.

In the new CADsmart Revit skills assessment we wanted to assess a user's ability to create schedules as specified, but met a dead end with a support request on the ADN confirming that with schedules most commands are disabled, and that there is no API that allows access to any cell values in a schedule.

I'm hoping that this might be resolved with the next release. For the moment our assessment asks the user to export the schedule to a delimited text file so our code can access it, which is perfectly legitimate, but a step I'd rather do without.