The essay was an efficient assessment because producing one required the understanding it was meant to demonstrate. That link has broken, and the response reshapes how marking works.
What a marked essay used to evidence
An essay was never valued as a document. It was valued as a trace of the reading, structuring and reasoning required to produce it.
The grade attached to the artefact because the artefact could not exist without the process.
When the artefact can be produced independently of the process, the grade measures something other than what it claims to.
Why process replaced product
Institutions have moved towards assessing intermediate stages: annotated bibliographies, outlines, drafts with tracked revisions and reflective notes on decisions.
Each stage is individually forgeable, and the sequence is considerably harder to fake convincingly than a final document.
The cost is real. Marking five artefacts per student instead of one multiplies workload at exactly the moment cohort sizes have grown. Departments absorbing that without additional staff tend to mark the stages superficially, which returns the problem in a different form.
How oral defence returned
A short conversation about a submitted piece is the cheapest reliable check available, and it has reappeared widely for that reason.
A student who did the work discusses their choices fluently. A student who did not cannot explain why a particular source was included.
Ten minutes per student is expensive at scale, which is why most implementations sample rather than test everyone. Sampling works because the possibility of being called is what changes behaviour, not the certainty of it.
Why detection tools failed as a substitute
Detection classifiers were adopted quickly and produce both false accusations and missed cases, neither of which an institution can tolerate.
Non-native writers are flagged disproportionately, because the statistical markers of generated text overlap with the markers of careful second-language prose.
Most institutions have since demoted detection scores from evidence to signal, usable for prompting a conversation and not for a finding of misconduct. That demotion happened quickly once the first contested cases reached appeal panels.
What the new assessments cost
Supervised in-person writing and oral examination both work, and both consume staff time and room bookings that timetables were not built for.
Distance programmes cannot use either without changing what they are, which is why the pressure is sharpest there.
The honest position is that assessment just became more expensive, and institutions are choosing between paying that cost, sampling their way around it, or accepting that a portion of grades no longer certify what they used to.