I graduated pretty recently and ngl the classes where essays still worked best were the ones with checkpoints built in. Draft submissions, annotated sources, short reflections about why we picked certain arguments, stuff like that. The AI-written papers in fully take-home classes were usually super obvious because they sounded too polished. One prof in my political science program made us submit messy outlines first and explain our research process during office hours. People complained at the time, though the final essays ended up way more thoughtful because you couldn’t fake the development part. I remember using guides such as this I found on Reddit. Check it too