The reason for these rules is not related to printing. These rules are in place to enable fair grading:
- fixed font styling and page margins allow proper comparison of paper lengths (e.g. a student might try to use a bigger font size or bigger margins to get around a "submit 3 pages of text on issue xxx")
- fixed line height requirements allow teachers to print out the submitted document and annotate it - the resulting prints and the correction marks are usually archived to make disputes easier
They used something called word count.
Similarly, I was in college when word processing was introduced, and I think that turning in lengthy and typographically perfect term papers probably boosted my GPA. Thanks to doing lots of programming, I could sling text like nobody's business.
Their K-12 teachers are telling them this. Rather than actually teach kids how to evaluate information, it's easier to just give a set of rules. The kids are given a "rubric," which is basically a glorified worksheet, with precise details on exactly what's required. The rubric has to be precise enough that there's no way for a student to dispute the grade that they receive.
The question is not which website is credible, but what you can get away with on a paper.
THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files.
My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, respectively. When they were in grade school, we still needed to have MS Word in the house, because some of the teachers would freeze if a file wasn't in .docx format. Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed.
Today, Word is a thing of the past. The kids do everything in the cloud, and the teachers have mostly figured it out. The last remaining uses of MS Word will be in academia, for manuscripts, and in business, for documents that nobody ever reads.