It annoys people into updating their password, for one.
Which they could of accomplished with a password reset via email.
It's a .edu. The password you just reset is the same as the password for their email.
Whether it provides a benefit or not is unrelated to the fact that they don't need to know your plaintext password to use something like the regex I wrote to detect a string duplicated twice and extract the first match prior to hashing/checking against the DB.