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Even before ChatGPT many humanities students were super-lazy and didn't bother to do even a very dumbed down amount of work. Nor were they prepared to put even a mild effort into pretending they'd done so. If they ask you to read a huge amount of text, you can just read some of it looking for a question based on that info to ask, ask the question and it'll seem like you've done the reading. But there were many who couldn't even be bothered with that, even when the lecturer tacitly encouraged us to do it.
It was quite awkward when someone from outside uni came in as a guest teacher and expected students to actually do significant amounts of reading for a course.
People go to university as a cultural ritual, I only really learned anything from one unusually hard course.
That's a skill too and that's the intended way of completing the assignment. Hardcore skimming will help you a lot later in life.
It's not and it won't.
It's one of the many really poor habits that formal education engrains in you.
With all due respect, I think you're being quite Panglossian about the education you received.
I wonder how many billions of dollars (and how many lives) have been lost due to a "eh, I skimmed it and got the gist" approach to analysis fostered by forcing students to read large quantities of horribly overwritten, low content academic work.
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It is and it does
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