No, it isn't, but being able to keep to word counts is a good skill. In school I've had teachers that were brutal both ways. One insisted on a minimum work count where more was better, and another had stated flatly that anything beyond a certain number of pages would not be read, any excess pages would be thrown in the trash.
I know, a friend of mine is in college and just went through both sides as well. XD One would give you a zero if you were even one word over the count, the other just set a minimum. It's hard for me because I never want my stories to end unless everyone dies. Lol. And I just checked. It's 900 something words. I'll just write something else. >.>
One of my teachers set an "Anything over 5 pages will not be read" rule for an essay. I wrote 4 and 2/3 pages and she knocked off points because it wasn't over 5 pages like the rest of the class. >.<
It doesn't. I argued with her over it for a week and begged her to grade my paper based on content, because I would argue that mine was one of the best in the class. But she wouldn't do it.
Ouch. Yeah, it was my poli-sci teacher that said that he's trash anything over six pages. I can within one line of it, and only after lowering the font size from 12 to 11. I've had to do that on more than one occasion, adn have yet to find a teacher who called me on it. Another trick I used to use was lowering the spacing from double to one and a half spacing. It usually gives you an extra few lines at the bottom.
I did have a paper where I went shooting over the page count, but I didn't get in trouble because it was due to a very large appendix.