There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.

In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).

The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.

Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.