It amazes me in my coursework when I see students losing large sums of points by not following the instructions. I’ve seen multi-page reports that fail to address the prompt in any way.

It’s far worse with users that have more ‘book knowledge’ – that is, more education. Experimentally, common sense seems to be modeled by:

common sense = k^-((years of post-secondary education-c)/4)

Where ‘k’ is a constant relating to how much of the real world the user has been exposed to and ‘c’ is how resistant the user is to academia. As you can see, with every passing year end of education, the individual gets better in their field at the expense of becoming exponentially dumber in preforming simple tasks.

You remind me of an XKCD comic. RTFM indeed.
http://xkcd.com/293/