I was pretty unreliable about homework, but the school I went to didn't necessarily take it out of my grades. At the time, I felt that the homework was unnecessary to learn the material being taught, so it was a waste of time.

Now, with kids of my own, I'm wondering if the reason I have so much trouble doing work that I find uninteresting, even when I intellectually believe that I'd be happier having done it, is that I never practiced doing boring work while everyone else was. So even if homework is useless as a teaching tool, maybe the act of doing boring work teaches a useful life skill.