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I had some background in programming before taking the intro CS course at my college, but not much. This intro class is done in C and most students who take it seriously, myself included, think this is a good choice. I think C probably seems more difficult than it is to those who are used to high level languages because they are accustomed to concise programs while C requires many more lines of code. Someone new to coding isn't used to the concision of other programming languages so this doesn't bother them.

And aside from pointers, there really isn't anything in C that is harder than any other programming language. I personally found pointers easy to learn, which I think was the result of having them explained clearly and then being forced to use them in my code.

I'm not sure that your last statement is true:

> But, if you don't grade something, students aren't going to put their full effort into it. Hence, exams.

I'm now in college, but when I went to high school my physics teacher would give us weekly quizes that covered the material we were learning. This quizes weren't graded but were used to assess what we had learned well and what we needed more work on. Everyone seemed to give these quizes a decent effort for pride reasons, they were still graded and handed back by our teacher but the grades were not recorded.

Now part of the success of this approach may have been the quality of the students I went to school with, I attended a selective private school, but I would think you have similarly disciplined and focused students in the CS departments at most universities, so I don't see why this approach wouldn't work there as well.