I do think that the split would be an interesting idea. At my university, our first year programming class was divided between people who found it too hard, and people who found it way too easy.
Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.