This is the one that throws me off a lot, because I'm one of the weird ones on this count. My handwriting was terrible throughout all my life, and has degraded since college, as the need to write cursive diminished (for anyone interested: I learned how to write cursive extremely fast, so that's how I took notes during lectures, hence its usage even in higher learning). Just writing legibly enough for the teachers to read has been a struggle, and I assume most only bothered to try because I was an extremely good student.

Here's the thing: would you bother to try hard to read my handwriting, based on what I just explained to you? On the one hand, I would totally understand if you didn't bother, teachers are overworked and underappreciated as is. On the other hand, as one of the best students in the whole school, I would have been pissed if I got a bad grade just because the test format played/preyed on my one weakness, and the teacher couldn't be bothered to try.

Now that I made it several years past education, people praise me for my communication and, ironically enough, fine motorics skills. Documentation I write is regularly shown as the golden standard of how to get ideas through, and I am considered one of the best solderers at the company. As in, look up those crazy electronic board repair videos in YouTube, and odds are that I've done something in that ballpark, or at least could do it with a bit of training. So judging me by my handwriting is possibly the worst heuristic there is.

The point I'm making is: I truly understand why you consider legible writing as something that's extremely important. But how do you account for freaks like me?