C ++ in universities in practice

Actually, I am leading this C ++ and I see that the students are coping worse and worse, and I need to do something. Either I study badly, or the tasks are difficult or not at all interesting ...
Will the community share their experiences? Very briefly a couple of questions:

1. What level of complexity do the work on C ++ in your university?
2. How far does it cost to go into the wilds of WinAPI / MFC and, again, at what level of complexity of work?

upd: Students have 1 course, so they just start learning C ++ in one semester, in the second they study GUI under windows.
upd2: Specialty profile, Software computing and automated systems