My 1st year profs were all fantastic, and the intro Java courses that I took did a fairly good job scaling from Hello World and FizzBang to a visual calculator processing pre-, in-, and post-fix arithmetic in a binary tree, so it wasn't too bad. Granted, first year was really easy and passed most students. Second year has, iirc, a 60% pass rate, and the program overall has a 40% pass rate. I'm not sure if that means it's rigorous or the profs are lousy, but I at least feel it means my degree is worth something when I graduate.