We were also forced to have perfect MLA citations in high school where the librarian had to sign off on it and you had to go rewrite it for any arbitrary little thing - what a monumental waste of time. They probably still make the students do that.
Given the seeming inability of many people to gauge the voracity of primary sources, I'm not so sure the teachers were wrong in this case. I know I liked reading wikipedia and copying the sources from there, but there's something to be said for teaching exactly how unreliable a source is based on the inability to properly cite it.
I think that focus was a waste - when you really need to do that in graduate school it’s not hard to figure out and you can use software to do it.
They also made us put inline citations in the writing itself (you couldn’t even say the year someone was born without citing the source).
Of course the teachers didn’t actually look at the source and discuss its quality (which may have been useful) - they instead obsessed over minutia of where exactly a space or period is required in the citation and if it’s a periodical or website.