It's my experience that more practical courses of study, like Accounting, Engineering, and hard sciences tend to be much harder to succeed in than, say, Art History or English Literature.

Erk. I don't disbelieve your claims but the very thought seems so bizarre to me. In the hard sciences you get to go do exams that are worth about 90% of the mark, mostly objective and based on some rules from nature that are fairly easy to grasp. The alternative is trying to learn an endless stream of teacher's passwords!