I encountered this scoring high-stakes state tests years back; the 10th-grade students were prompted explicitly with "tell me a story about XYZ." (more verbiage omitted, but the question was clear about the requested mode). About 10% of students would write a clearly on-topic response starting from "here are 3 things about XYZ".
The state specified that those responses were to be scored "Off Mode", an invalid score which meant that the students would fail the test (and potentially fail to graduate).
The truly mindblowing part is that younger students will write you a narrative for ANYTHING given half a chance. (Think of a little kid telling you a story - "and then this happened, and then this, and then this...") These high-schoolers had literally had that instinct drummed out of them through essay-writing practice. :(
I also could get into studying a subject for the sole purpose of passing a test and then forgetting the content after (meaning the topic held no significance to the student). This is a huge problem in high schools all around the US.
Edit: fix mobile formatting
For me, the biggest problem is that most instructors never really mentioned this. Instead, we ended up having 50 minute discussions about why the wallpaper was yellow, or how brave and sophisticated the protagonist was for drowning herself (I hated "The Awakening.") My experience is my own, but the majority of my classmates didn't care about the reading for this very reason (and this was also at a high-performing school). If high school English literature is still being taught anything like the way it was taught to me, it should be no surprise that American students avoid the subject like the plague.
Learning to research a topic and write a logical argument about it is far more rewarding, and does more to develop skill, than does being assigned a book to read and writing a summary.
Writing about a single source is too easy to game, especially the classics- there's simply too much already written about them, especially when the assignment is more a summary than a thesis.
And yes, I did read the book :) Just forgot the time period.
I also read several other classical plays and not just the two that where set.
The solution is to assign books that do not have online summaries, which would be about 99% of books. Plenty to choose from!
If you think it was just about an authoritarian society, I suggest looking back at the beginning, before the pigs started changing the rules.
In college it can be difficult to transition to professors that expect you to actually be able to express yourself eloquently and with creativity. Most students aren’t reading old or difficult books for fun (if any at all). It’s not surprising their level is poor.