> Any course can come with relatively "low" standards of assessment.

Absolutely not.

There's no way I could have used the same practice-free methods employed in excelling in humanities classes to similarly excel in the sciences. In the hard sciences, it was imperative that I develop the skills to apply the fundamental knowledge tools to solve the problems posed. I couldn't bullshit my way through with wisps of knowledge gathered from fellow students.

These were the equivalents of 101-level classes, and passing a science 101 class, or even a bunch of them, is hardly equivalent to "excelling in the sciences". Doing actual scholarship, perhaps in understudied corners of the discipline where even basic reviews and surveys of existing work are hard to come by, is something entirely different.

... I was 1 course away from qualifying for an English Major. I didn't bother, because it's not what I'm passionate in. I assure you that I easily sailed through plenty of upper-division undergraduate courses. Likewise, I worked my way through a fair number of upper-division math and science classes; my specialization was in Theoretical Computing.

I did some "actual scholarship" for a few of the upper-division English courses; pouring through musty old volumes that were last reviewed by human hand a half century or more prior. The gotcha with this? So long as I cited appropriately, and aligned myself with the cultural and political viewpoints of the overseeing professor, I was easily assured an excellent grade. It was enough that it appeared that I did the work and parroted the correct thoughts.