For her literature classes - where the class grade is composed of a participation grade and a written work grade - she is strongly considering getting rid of all written homework. Instead all writing work will be hand written in class.
The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.
When you attach a literal degree to something being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement" you're going to get people that game the system. When you then make me pay $30,000 or more for a piece of paper you will get people that seek an edge. I did my fair share of underhanded tricks in school because I didnt want to pay another $1200 because I had to maintain a certain GPA to get where I wanted. This was over 15 years ago. Focus in the classes you care about, game the classes you don't. Its a tale as old as education itself.
Blame the OP's wife and the faculty and most universities for not only supporting but encouraging this behavior. If universities are for learning and improving the weight of grades shouldn't be career-determining and the cost should be commensurate to the expectation - both from the professor and the students.
Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations.
Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking".
If we were to write an essay, we would use an LLM to do the actual writing, and feed it a set of bullet points for the points we want to make. Same as our parents moved from handwriting to word processing, we're moving to LLMs as a writing tool.
We're also seeing (that the article didn't mention) that LLMs are being used by staff to grade student essays. Getting to that ridiculous point of an LLM writing content that only an LLM will ever read.
So why not just abandon the essay as a teaching tool? I realise that academia is slow to change, but this might force them to.
Replace it with student presentations, or whatever the actual industry the students are heading for uses to communicate.
As for academia moving away from publishing papers (which are also increasingly being written by LLMs) into journals... that will need to happen too. What replaces that is going to be interesting.
This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.
"Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations."
ooh-a for the new way to write outrageous essays so to engage people.