> It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.
Maybe things have really changed a lot since I was in school, but that was certainly not the type of questions that were asked of set works.
The questions were asked such that, the more the student got into the book, the higher the mark they were able to get.
Easy questions (everyone gets this correct if they read the book): Did his friends and family consider $protagonist to be miserly or generous.
Hard questions (only those slightly interested got these correct): Examine the tone of the conversation between $A and $B in $chapter, first from the PoV of $A and then from the PoV of $B. List the differences, if any, in the tone that $A intended his instructions to be received and the tone that $B actually understood it as.
Very hard questions (for those who got +90% on their English grades): In the story arc for $A it can be claimed that the author intended to mirror the arc for Cordelia from King Lear. Make an argument for or against this claim.
That last one is the real deal; answerable only by students who like to read and have read a lot - it involves having read similar characters from similar stories, then knowing about the role of Cordelia, and at least a basic analysis of her character/integrity, maybe having read more works by this same author (they'll know if the mirroring is accidental or intentional), etc.
We were never asked "what color shirt did $A wear to the outing" types of questions (unless, of course, that was integral to the plot - $A was a double-agent, and a red shirt meant one thing to his handler while a blue shirt meant something else).
Did I like the set works? Mostly not, but I had enough fiction under my belt in my final two years of high-school that I could sail through the very difficult questions, pulling in analogies and character arcs, tone, etc from a multitude of Shakespeare plays, social issue fictional books ("Cry, The Beloved Country", "To Kill a Man's Pride", "To Kill a Mockingbird", etc), thrillers (Frederick Forsythe, et al), SciFi (Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick), Horror-ish (Stephen Kind, Dean R Koontz) and more.
With my teenager now, second-final year of high-school, I keep repeating the mantra of "To get high English marks, you need to demonstrate critical thinking, not usage of fancy words", but alas, he never reads anything that can be considered a book, so his marks never get anywhere near the 90% grade that I regularly averaged :-(
The only books he's ever read are those he's been forced to read in school.