Ha. I quit my grad school when a prof admitted he didn't read the papers he made us write. It was good practice for making sure I never put up with a job like that.
So I printed off random "techy" stuff and some cat pictures online and gave it to them to see if they even opened the document up. To this day they never noticed anything and I did that for 2 years before I left. I still did what I could at my job, but the time spent on those reports dropped to nothing after my test.
The was government though, but I have seen the same thing at many schools I worked at before.
I agree that it would be better if someone would read them and give actual feedback based on your actual performance. But looking at my own little episode in academia, the most was learned while writing stuff.