That it's important to read things. They just don't.

It doesn't matter how many sample assignments, rubrics, explanations, etc I post, I will still get "so... what are we supposed to do?"

I have a persuasive speech assignment that's about a particular topic (I was so tired of political speeches that definitively had talking points taken from memes and where I had to argue about the credibility of sources when they tried to cite Facebook posts with 100% made up information). The prompt explains this pretty clearly with sample speech examples. The topic isn't buried in the assignment prompt in any way. But no fail, every semester, I still get at least 10 assignment submissions where the student clearly thought they could choose any persuasive speech topic and didn't actually read the prompt.

A different paper prompt clearly states in two different places "you need 6 sources" with a discussion of the types of sources that they should use. Still, get at least 5 emails "how many sources do we need?"

Confusing. Would be less confusing if I didn't have the same people who grade-grub for every point on the backend submit assignments where they obviously did not read the actual prompt or rubric before submitting it. You would think they would want to know the criteria they are being graded on when it's right there and available to them in detail. It's very weird.