Comment by giantg2
"but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they understand the subject and that they have "learned to learn"."
That depends on the perspective. In theory, that is the correct view. To many, the degree is just a piece of paper used to gatekeep jobs.
It's not just a piece of paper - it's a piece of paper that shows you can complete a 4-year course of study in a particular field. I'm not sure how useful a piece of paper that says you spent 4 years typing prompts into a LLM could be without a huge change in how education works.