In my STEM courses in college, we had weekly problem sets that were checked but not counted towards the grade. There was a midterm or two and a final and those were the only things that were graded.
In my non-STEM courses, we usually had a few shorter papers assigned as well as a longer final paper and that was it.
My son's college courses are somewhat more high schoolish than mine were (homework is graded and counted in his calculus class, for example) but they are far less high schoolish than his IB courses were.
