When No to Pass a Student

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Years ago, when I was a high school basketball coach, I took a University summer school course in weight training for athletes. It was a one week, one credit hour course. On the first day, there had to be 60 people in the room. The instructor called the role, and naturally I was one of the first names called.
Which explains why so many high school coaches have no idea what a proper squat looks like, much less how to teach it.
 
Regardless of what @boulderjohn says about mastery learning, the fact remains that individual instructors are at liberty to self-define what they consider to be "expected of a diver at that certification level".

In many (most?) cases, that instructor or dive center expectation is based on what can reasonably be achieved within the bare minimum standards (time and dives) laid out for a course. There is an economic or commercial bias.

This is when instructors lament that they wish they had more time/opportunity to train higher quality divers, but feel retrained in doing so.

In other cases, it is based on their own memories of training and extrapolated relatively from their current skill level. If the instructor was badly trained, or remains relatively unskilled, then their expectations for students can be skewed below an ideal.

This is when instructors don't know, or don't care, that they are training low quality divers.

I understand that it'd be easy for some individuals to deny this and put their heads under the sand... especially if they had limited exposure to training on a global basis... or weren't in a position where diving instruction was their only, or most significant, source of income.
 
Regardless of what @boulderjohn says about mastery learning, the fact remains that individual instructors are at liberty to self-define what they consider to be "expected of a diver at that certification level".
I've gone over that many times in the past as well. Perhaps you should attend my workshop entitled, "The Illusion of Objectivity," which shows that at some point in the system, it is all based on subjectivity. In a performance assessment, the instructor has to compare what he or she is seeing with a mental model of an acceptable performance. The key is training the instructor on that model. There are very few kinds of assessments in which truly objective measures can be used. As one expert said at a conference I attended, that kind of assessment "only works in shoe selling and buffalo hunting."

No matter what kind of system you are using, if an instructor wants to cut corners, the instructor will cut corners. My niece was certified by an agency other than PADI after one two hour pool session and one OW dive to 10 feet. A couple years ago we had a thread in which students paid a good Groupon price for the pool sessions to a shop aligned with an agency other than PADI. At the end of the pool session, the instructor explained to the class that none of them had passed, and if they wanted to go on take the OW dives and be certified, they would have to repeat the entire pool sessions at the normal shop price. What system would you use to prevent either of those two abuses?
 
No matter what kind of system you are using, if an instructor wants to cut corners, the instructor will cut corners.

GUE don't seem to have a problem.

I particularly like the specificity with which they spell out their performance standards - which leave little room for cutting corners.
 
GUE don't seem to have a problem.
Why don't you drop all your other affiliations, get GUE certified, and teach exclusively for them?
 
GUE don't seem to have a problem.

Actually they do. I have posted several times about a fundamentals class I witnessed in Egypt and it got the attention of GUE who wanted me to tell them the instructor's name.

About mastery

Mastery is defined as being able to perform a skill repeatedly, correctly and comfortably. In the context of the OP's post, it's pretty clear that the student wasn't able to perform skills in this manner.

"Perfectly" is not part of that definition and that's the slippery slope. "perfect" execution of a skill is hard to define and it's different depending on how much experience the diver has.. This is just a fact of life so complaining about it being like this doesn't make much sense.

Nevertheless, all instructors are trained to initially understand what "good enough" looks like. You were taught like that. So was I, so was John and so were the unimaginable train wrecks of instructors that people complain about on the interwebs.

However, almost immediately after newly certified instructors start teaching they start to "drift". Some instructors become more strict than PADI (or any agency, since they all work the same way) really trained them for and some become sloppier. Over time this drift can become severe. PADI is the only agency I know of that invests much effort into any kind of QA that regularly identifies and "re-calibrates" the "train wrecks". Other agencies do work on QA but not in the same way. GUE, for example, as I alluded to above seems happy to do QA based upon hearsay. Other agencies probably do other things.

On the flip side, instructors who become severely de-calibrated on the stricter end of the scale can cause problems too by potentially putting students at risk by requiring learning skills that are unrealistic, or learning skills in an unrealistic manner. As far as I know, most agencies don't seem to actively weed out these instructors but I've read some stories on the internet that makes me think that the problems can be real. It also seems clear that students can get confronted with escalating costs for things that they have already learned well enough for the agency, but not for the instructor. If this is what the student want's fine, but sometimes instructor's perfectionism can get in the way of being fair.

R..
 
I want to thank Rob (Diver0001) for explaining about calibration and drifting and saving me the effort.

The problem for scuba is that quality control that is required to maintain an individual's calibration, and that does indeed vary. Ideally, if the instructor is working for a dive shop, the shop will have someone in a directorship role that will monitor instruction and keep things at an acceptable level. Unfortunately, in some cases it is that supervisor who may not only let things slip, he or she may encourage or even require it. The fact that my OW training did not meet a number of standards had to be well known and even required by the shop management.

An instructor working independently can do anything and get away with it, like the instructor (not PADI) who certified my niece after a 2 hour pool session and one OW dive to 10 feet. Such people can only be identified by an agency if there is some sort of independent QA process that allows the agency leadership to find out. In another case I know well, an instructor for an agency other than PADI is known to teach the pool sessions while seated in a chair next to the pool. He tells the students what to do, and they go under water and do it. I know this was made known to a member of the BoD of that agency, and I know the BoD discussed him and decided not to intervene. As far as I know, that instructor still works that way. (His OW checkout dive techniques are similarly suspect, BTW.)
 
PADI is the only agency I know of that invests much effort into any kind of QA that regularly identifies and "re-calibrates" the "train wrecks". Other agencies do work on QA but not in the same way. GUE, for example, as I alluded to above seems happy to do QA based upon hearsay. Other agencies probably do other things.
GUE requires that an instructor recert every 3? years in front of an I.E. in addition there is feedback from other instructors who run into your former students in subsequent classes.
 
As has been said many times, current day OW instruction is nothing like the OW course taken by many of us back in the 60s (or 50s). My course was three weeks long (night meetings and weekends) and people failed if they did not satisfactorily complete all requirements. Today you can get OW certified in a weekend. I've seen the difference it makes.
 
Which explains why so many high school coaches have no idea what a proper squat looks like, much less how to teach it.

Wrong place for this comment. That said, as a High School Soccer coach, who teams have beaten 2 College teams over the past 5 years I can say this. Many Clubs, College and National Program Coaches are SO Rude, nasty, arrogant and down right unfriendly to High School Coach's, it makes it hard on us to want to engage with them.
 
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