What is generally expected on language exams for humanities students?
I'll give a sketch of an answer, from the perspective of someone at a top 10 university in the U.S.

Recently, I had a consultation about potentially doing German coursework. It was also suggested I take a course for learning to read German that was intended for graduate students who needed to meet their reading competency requirements, particularly since I had placed (however accurately) into second-year German. The reading course presumes no initial German knowledge of its students. Moreover, the course only takes up the time of a single term. I would be thus inclined to say that the reading exams cannot be possibly so difficult, but I have a lot of trouble reading samples for the German one without more knowledge.

Since the quality of my French is less suspect, I'll use that as an example. Looking at old reading exams for French at my university, I would probably be able to pass (or at least not fail abysmally), and I probably have at least the knowledge of almost two year's of college-level French. But what really helps is that I have a good chunk of knowledge about grammatical forms (so I can look at a verb and guess its infinitive easily and more experience with vocabulary than I do in German.

So perhaps the language competency exams, at least when based on more humanities-oriented texts, really aren't that difficult, but only in the sense that a student who knows a lot of grammar and has some good experience of vocabulary should be able to survive.