Have you scoured the syllabus for any mention of this policy?

Yep, and nothing even remote was mentioned.

There are a multitude of reasons why a student may not have been able to keep particular (or any) essays Like? I can't think of any. Why wouldn't you keep all your work?

The cynic in me suspects that the professor lost some of her grades and is trying to bluff students into returning them to her so that she can rerecord them.

@TomW Because over a year it becomes a lot of paper to keep track of, and if you don't think you'll need it again (or would really rather never see it again), throwing it out or not organizing it doesn't seem far-fetched. If a professor had sprung this on me in university, I likely wouldn't be able to find all past assignments.

@JMac keeping all coursework, class notes, assignments lab reports etc was an essential part of studying engineering - may not be the case for other disciplines but that may be the difference of 24 hours of contact compared to those who had 8 hours of contact per week.... ie they spent most of their time in the student union drinking...

@SolarMike I kept and still have my work from my engineering, maths, and CS courses (at least the electronic copies) but the required electives like English, Philosophy, et al. - hard pressed to think of a time I ever kept a single graded paper. I just looked at grade and threw it away (I kept two interesting, to me, papers about AI & philosophy for later research but not the graded ones just my saved drafts). I don't know if that was the best idea but I do know I had a high GPA and would be pretty annoyed with this requirement if it wasn't stated up-front. And I never went out drinking @ SU

@JGreenwell yes, re the SU - we went to other pubs with better beer... CAMRA ...

@SolarMike no, it means I did my undergraduate mostly on a military base where if I didn't get a B or higher I had to pay for (if I did Marines would) so I was really focused but still didn't keep graded work in all my classes. And I had kids when I went for graduate work - kinda put the damper on pubs and bars - and still never kept work from the few elective classes I had because it was elective - i.e. not important to me. I don't see why you insist on imply that either you keep every single thing which is graded or your a drunk and bad student

@JGreenwell Enjoy beer yes, does not mean drunk...

@JohnColeman : This is what occurred to me immediately. +1. Some student should press the instructor for a list of his essay scores to see what that will produce.

OP, is the instructor asking for essays from the semester currently in progress, or a semester that has already concluded? It's not clear; you say "the whole semester" which sounds like the current one, but then you say "the past semester" which could be a semester before the current one.

As an aside, why isn't your institution using some sort of cloud-based tool such as Blackboard, Canvas, ...?

@shoover it's a 2 semester class, she wanted essays from both. We are currently in the second semester. Unsure why we don't use any of those.

@Equinox I know she wanted graded copies, but do you have the ungraded versions stored on your computer somewhere, if the essays were typed? Or were they handwritten essays?

Yep, I have all the ungraded copies in a folder. It's the graded copies she wants.

So what? The obvious question is: What is she proposing/threatening to do to students who don't provide them (or didn't keep them)? Assume that most below-average students don't provide them, and most above-average students do. What happens next? Presumably she will get in major trouble for losing track of everyone's assignment grades. But maybe she will add extra homeworks or tests. Anyway, your class representative should ask for this stuff to be stored online so it can't be lost.