While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies.
I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...
I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.
So rather than try to improve the situation by teaching them techniques for doing this winnowing and skimming, which would a) reduce the stress on their students (both in the class and in the real world), and b) increase the efficiency and productivity of the students once they were out there working, they instead chose to perpetuate the significantly more negative status quo.
I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...