It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors.
CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
I think a good metric for classes is the final assignment, since it captures "how far" the class goes. For reference, the final assignments are:
106A --- It varies, but has recently been a text-based "Adventure"-style game (in Java) that requires tracking the map, player state, various objects and their capabilities, etc. I think there might also be a small graphical component.
106B/X --- Again, it varies, but the best assignment (in my view) is a BASIC interpreter that implements both a REPL and stored programs. All C++, it's about building a big list of abstract expressions of different types (assignment, etc) that can be executed by walking that list (taking advantage of dynamic dispatch) and tracking global program state. It's a nice intersection of data structures and (very simple) recursive descent parsing.
107 --- A heap allocator to implement malloc(), realloc(), and free(), written on top of mmap(). A fantastic assignment.
So yeah, they're not trivial classes.
to clarify: 106a is java, basically an intro to OO stuff and 106b is C++, getting into data structures, etc.