It's not fair to assume that's what this teacher asks of their students. Word minimums may be useful for children as a crude deterrent against laziness, but any serious student or teacher would recognize a good essay when they see one, no matter the length (though fitting a good and interesting essay on the back of a napkin would be almost unthinkably prolific).

"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal

There's nothing to assume because he describes what he asks of his students towards the last part of the essay.

But people who think ChatGPT is great usually aren't capable of reading that far :P

A word count is also a signal to the student of what level of depth the teacher is hoping for.

For most interesting questions you could write anything between a few sentences and a full book, depending on how much you develop and defend your arguments, evaluate other possible answers, etc.

The word count is a signal on where on that spectrum you should be aiming.

If we see Pascal's quote as a pretext, it could be used to justify writing longer texts, even when brevity is possible and appropriate. However, by interpreting the quote as a genuine apology for the length of his letter, we can recognize the importance of clarity and conciseness in communication, and strive to make our own messages as clear and concise as possible. This highlights the importance of interpreting someone's words in the right context, and not using them to justify behaviors or attitudes that are not aligned with the speaker's true intentions. By being mindful of how we interpret others' words, we can avoid misunderstandings and communicate more effectively.

Sorry for the potential insult, but your paragraph feels very ChatGPT-like to me. Did I get that right?

Yes, it is a gray wall, a building of formal structure of literature. In the end, it is a tool - education system, academia, not chatGPT- , what we see is representation. For current -common- attention span, it is way too long. For current perception of speed of time, it is very expensive. Can we complain ? Tool that we shape. We may just need to change the representation.

Word counts in essays in my experience are maximums not minimums.

For an advanced student writing about sufficiently complex topic, the challenge is to develop an argument in less than 5000 words, rather than to reach 5000 words.

And there is a big difference between writing an outline (which is valuable and important!) and actually expressing those ideas fully. The latter forces you to clarify your ideas much more precisely - which is a really valuable experience in exploring and understanding the details of a topic.

This assumes that the student places the class and knowledge (and writing effort) high in their list of priorities. I'd imagine that the people who are enticed to use an AI solution for writing an essay would have otherwise found writing it way down on their list of desires and would therefore be using many of the tried-and-true tricks to pad out their work.

Well sure, if a student doesn't engage meaningfully with the essay and just writes a load of waffle to fill the word count, they won't learn as much and they'll get a bad mark.

In that case sure, the whole exercise is kind of a waste of time, but you could say that about basically any educational method surely? You can take a horse to water and all that...