First things first: a doctoral student should be expected to publish something other than a thesis. Even if she has no desire to enter into a research profession after the PhD, publication of scholarly articles should be an important milestone in the process.
Beyond that, however, expecting that a student—whether a master's student or a PhD student, or even worse, an undergraduate—publish a paper as part of a single "course"—is absurd for a multitude of reasons. First, in the context of a single educational course, the time spent will almost certainly be unsuitable for the preparation of a manuscript; moreover, given the lag times in between submission of an article to a journal or conference and its acceptance, it is unlikely that it can be completed within either a trimester or even a semester, which means that incomplete grades will likely be par for the course.
Thus, since it serves no real valid educational purpose for the students—since the work isn't being evaluated by the educational staff whose job it is to provide instruction—such behavior is extremely questionable, and very likely unethical. This is doubly so if the only criterion for grading is the acceptance of the paper in an external journal, particularly since there are so many "pay-to-publish" journals out there that will publish anything, given the page charges.
Now, I do require that students prepare something like a research article for one of the courses I teach. However, I do that as an exercise in preparing them for writing research articles. I have no expectation that they would bother to submit these papers to actual journals—the material just isn't sufficient for that. However, in terms of learning how to write a paper—mentioning relevant literature, explaining their methodology, clearly demonstrating and illustrating their results, there is nothing comparable. You learn to be a researcher by doing research—and that includes writing about research!