When No to Pass a Student

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Few Comments:
1. The OW is awarded at a point of time. Then training and skills and knowledge use decay with lack 0f use. I have had several instabuddies who had forgotten how to assemble their gear. It had been months since they last did it for a few times.
2. The dive with my wife or children, if they dove, standard for me is way past the decent keep themselves alive criteria. Not sure any new OW diver would make it.
3. I have seen a number of times where a few gentle friendly comments produced a much better dive buddy on dive 2.
 
Assuming a 'bell curve' of student learning capabilities, there'll be a few who can "master" all the requirements in those bare minimum timescale and dives. Most will require a little longer. Some will need substantially more time and training.
This is a really inaccurate description of the relationship of the bell curve to the instructional process. The application of the bell curve to instruction was bad to begin with, but this one is even farther off than most.
  • The bell curve describes the supposed range of abilities of the population as a whole, not the population of a dive class. The population as a whole includes people with no swimming ability, a profound fear of water, and no inclination to dive. Those people will be at the bottom of the bell curve and will not be in the class to begin with. A scuba class is thus not represented by a bell curve
  • You point assumes that the curriculum is designed to ensure that only the students at or above the MEDIAN level will succeed in the allotted amount of time. No one designs curriculum for a 50% failure rate in any learning environment whatsoever. Curricula are designed so that ALL students who have the prerequisite skills for a class and who put forth the required effort will succeed in the time allotted.
  • Bell curves supposedly represent the ability a student brings to the class; if the results of the class conform to a bell curve, that means the instructor was ineffective. The job of the instructor is to identify students who are struggling and then do whatever is necessary to bring those students up to standard. If an instructor who provides an accurate assessment of student performance at the end of a class has students perform in accordance with a bell curve, that instructor should be embarrassed. (When I took my teacher training, the bell curve was popular, and we were taught how to skew assessments--make them inaccurate--in order to achieve a bell curve result.)
  • Bell curve grading systems were in vogue once and are still popular in many areas of education, but I know of no educational theorist who supports that system today. They were replaced by what are called criterion-based or standards-based systems. In a bell curve assessment system, students are assessed in relation to the rest of the students. If you have 10 students, some will get top scores and some will get failing scores, no matter how good their performances. If you have 10 crappy performances, some of them will get top scores, even though their performances were crappy. If you have 10 outstanding performances, some of them will fail, even though their work was outstanding. Their scores tell you nothing about their actual performance. In a criterion or standards based system, students are judged against a standard performance, and they are scored accordingly. If they meet the standard of performance, they pass, even if everyone else in the class passed, too. If they do not meet that standard, they do not pass, even if no one else in the class did, either. Scuba instruction for all agencies I know is supposed to be standards-based.
 
Another problem with the bell curve is it discourages cooperation and team work which are so important for life and learning. If the number of As and Bs is fixed ahead of time then it discourages students from helping each other get ahead and that both makes more work for the instructor and reduces overall class learning.
 
If that's true John, then only excellent divers are being produced by the system you imagine.

And yet there's so much outcry over the low level of diver competency post-qualification.....
 
This whole thread brought up an interesting philosophical discussion between my husband and I. I don't know the answer but maybe someone here does.

When you pay for OW at a dive shop, are you paying for
- "Open Water Certification" (in which case they are responsible for teaching you until you have adequate skills to pass or even excel)
- "Open Water Instruction" (where they are teaching you the skills and you get a cert regardless of whether or not you are competent)
- Or "Open Water Testing" (with no responsibility to spend time teaching you but will pass/fail you depending on how you did).

I'm not trying to start a war. I'm honestly just curious.

That is a legitimate question. But I feel there is a fourth option: the operation/instructor has the responsibility (and fulfills) of teaching you, whether one passes and thus are certified is purely up to that individuals ability. There is no time for remedial training, at least with confined water.

According to most scuba agencies, the clear answer is #1: - "Open Water Certification" (in which case they are responsible for teaching you until you have adequate skills to pass or even excel). However, that is within reason. It then slips over to #4 when it goes beyond reason. The shop where I was working about a dozen years ago had a problem with two autistic children showed up without any sort of warning in a class of 5 students. I was assisting in the class then. We realized in the first pool session that it was not going to work. Eventually the instructor started working with the two of them on his own. He got the boy to the level of scuba diver and decided he should go no farther. He got the sister to full OW certification. There was no extra charge for the students and no extra pay for the instructor. That was unfair, so I checked with APDI and learned that there is nothing wrong with identifying a standard time period for a course and then charging extra for students who need extra time. This, of course, should be spelled out ahead of time.
 
If that's true John, then only excellent divers are being produced by the system you imagine.

And yet there's so much outcry over the low level of diver competency post-qualification.....
That is a complete and utter non sequitur. Nowhere did I declare that the standard for passing a class was excellence.
 
Another problem with the bell curve is it discourages cooperation and team work which are so important for life and learning. If the number of As and Bs is fixed ahead of time then it discourages students from helping each other get ahead and that both makes more work for the instructor and reduces overall class learning.
To give you idea of this absurdity....

At the end of his freshman year at Brown University, the son of a good friend had to meet with his chemistry professor for mandatory grade counseling. He learned that going into the final exam, he had an A. The professor asked him what he planned to do for a career, and he said he was thinking of medicine. The professor agreed that was a good choice and wished him well in his future as a doctor. He took the final exam, and he got an A on it. He was thus surprised when he got a B in the course. He went in to ask for the reason, and he was told it was because the professor graded on a bell curve. After the mandatory grade counseling, all the students who were at the bottom of the curve (F's and D's) dropped the class, as the school policy allowed. That shifted the entire curve downward. People who had been previously passing and who passed the final exam failed the course. My friend's son was one of several students who went from A's to B's because the total number of A's allotted was changed. He mentioned something about medical school, and the professor said he could forget about getting into medical school with a B in chemistry. He is now a very good lawyer.
 
Like almost all scuba agencies today, the PADI system used Benjamin Bloom's concept of mastery learning. This is explained in the PADI materials for instructors to learn during their instructor training, it is included in the instructor manual, and it should be drilled into the aspiring instructor by the instructor trainer. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand it because the the word "mastery" has a specific meaning in that educational context, and many people insist on using instead a definition that is found in general conversation. Here is how PADI defines it in the instructor manual (pages 24-25:
Mastery Learning
PADI courses/programs are performance based. Certification signifies that the student demonstrated mastery of all course knowledge and skill performance requirements.

During knowledge development, mastery is defined as meeting Knowledge Assessment requirements listed under Administrative Procedures. (See TecRec Instructor Guides for mastery requirements specific to technical diving courses.)

During confined and open water dives, mastery is defined as performing the skill so it meets the stated performance
requirements in a reasonably comfortable, fluid, repeatable manner as would be expected of a diver at that certification level.
Note that the definition does not call for excellence, which some people insist is meant by the word "mastery." An analogy would be to baseball. If you go to a Little League baseball game, you will see some players demonstrate mastery by playing the game in a reasonably comfortable, fluid, repeatable manner as would be expected of a player at that playing level." Even the best of those 12-year olds, though, will not have the same level of mastery as would be expected of a major league player.

Similarly, we expect a hovering OW student to display a level of mastery suitable for that certification level; we do not require that the student hold a deco stop in horizontal trim for 25 minutes without going more than a foot up or down. That is a standard of mastery for another time and another place.
 
"... reasonably comfortable, fluid, repeatable manner as would be expected of a diver at that certification level".

Perfect 'agency speak' that absolves the organisation and empowers instructors to set 'expectations' in line with everyone passing in the minimum timescale, with the minimum effort, for the minimum cost.
 
According to most scuba agencies, the clear answer is #1: - "Open Water Certification" (in which case they are responsible for teaching you until you have adequate skills to pass or even excel). However, that is within reason. It then slips over to #4 when it goes beyond reason. The shop where I was working about a dozen years ago had a problem with two autistic children showed up without any sort of warning in a class of 5 students. I was assisting in the class then. We realized in the first pool session that it was not going to work. Eventually the instructor started working with the two of them on his own. He got the boy to the level of scuba diver and decided he should go no farther. He got the sister to full OW certification. There was no extra charge for the students and no extra pay for the instructor. That was unfair, so I checked with APDI and learned that there is nothing wrong with identifying a standard time period for a course and then charging extra for students who need extra time. This, of course, should be spelled out ahead of time.
I think a lot of instructors will do this who do this for fun on the side. I don't think you are going to get that at factory dive centers in tropical destinations, especially ones that charge $99.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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