When I was doing CS in college, bad commenting was an academic requirement: As in your grade would be worse if you commented appropriately.

Over multiple courses including software engineering, comment quality and or correct use of comments was never in the syllabus.

But in several courses they wanted to see the code heavily commented, to the point where you were just re-writing the code as a comment and getting a green tick instead of a red "more comments!" note. I legitimately believe that my educators just didn't know any better themselves.

These days I live by the mantra: Comment to explain WHY not HOW, since the WHY is lost to time whereas the HOW is often self-descriptive.

PS - [0]Still my favorite comment of all time. I'm still pissed that someone tried to remove it from the article on Wikipedia (in particular as the comment is almost as famous as the code).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...