I had never heard of assignments being measured by page count before the Forum days, so I assumed it was a weird american thing to have page counts XD
Pretty much everything that has a chance of ending in some sort of publication - newspaper articles, academic papers submitted to a conference, etc. - gets metered/limited in terms of the space it'll take in said publication, for obvious reasons. Expect
very detailed instructions on how to write your papers if you go for an academic career. (Granted, not all of them are as extensive as
the APA's ...)