I’ve never written a college-level essay for a STEM class. I would probably have failed any non-intro level STEM class.

But speaking from a humanities perpspective, when you got a 650 word assignment it was almost always because the prof/TAs were handing out freebies to lighten their own workloads. As in, only way you fail them is by not turning anything in. Or at least that’s what I thought until now.

Definitely in a lit class, there is no way you are ever going to be submitting a 650 word essay. The only time I’ve had to do references packed that dense was in a Chinese history class and that was mostly because the prof had a hard-on for his own books.

If you did that in a lit class you it would actually drastically increase your chances of failing. It was viewed as just remixing other peoples’ work instead of writing anything of your own. The only exceptions were a class I took on translating literature, and classes on writing theory. And even then, 3-4 references per paragraph would be viewed as excessive.