Something I didn’t love about mandatory homework was that it provided an implied “you are done” point, when really it is the bare minimum (or maybe less than the bare minimum—there’s a pretty strong downward pressure if the instructor actually wants to provide thoughtful feedback).

Before college, when I was a kid, I just had the textbooks, so I read the chapters and did the assignments… it was much better than sitting and listening in lectures, then doing some small assigned subset of the problems…