I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause. Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has

I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause. 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 This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations.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.