I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I only had to go to five classes a few times a week so even with a part-time job I had more free time.

I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.