In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.

The concept of word count in high school was bonkers. Knowing my teacher wouldn't check, I wrote a dense line with a lot of words, using small print and small words, and then used that as my baseline (so let's say it had 20 words). Then if I needed 200 words total I'd write ten lines, knowing full well that other lines of text would only have 10-15 words.

Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.