It seems to me that if you made the standard objective, instead of subjective, it would benefit everyone - AND then you could also understand what it would mean to hold students to a higher standard.
I disagree and would stop teaching altogether. There's too much legalese in the Scuba industry already. If you want to learn how to clear your mask, go see a lawyer. If you want to learn how to dive, I'll be glad to help you out. The difference might be subtle to some, but it's incredibly sharp and clear to me.
How would having objective standards be any kind of problem for you? From what you have posted, it seems like you would be meeting or exceeding every objective standard that would apply.
I will respond from the point of view of an educational theorist who used to teach assessment theory. I used to teach how to evaluate students performances in a variety of subjects, and I trained people to do those evaluations in high stakes assessments.
In my training, I emphasized why striving for such objectivity was a serious mistake. When you attempt to create a scoring guide of the kind you made, there are precious few legitimate objective criteria you can use, and in many cases there are none. So you end of stretching to find the criteria you use, and you end up depending upon criteria that are not really valid and ignoring the truly valid evidence.
In assessment, we use the terms
reliability and
validity. In overly simplistic terms,
reliability is the ability of two different evaluators to give the same score to the same performance;
validity is the degree to which that score reflects the true quality of the performance. Untrained assessors are so focused on reliability that they lose track of validity. As a result, they get a completely reliable system that does not properly assess the performance, and it can be wildly off target.
For the trainings I did, I had a variety of examples in different subject areas--including even something as cut and dried as math. I would give the trainees an objective scoring guide and ask them to rate the quality of the guide before using it. Invariably, they would have no problem with it. I would then have them use it to score sample performances, and invariably they would all score them the same, showing that the guides were reliable. Then they would look at the samples using only their common sense and see that they had given the worst performances the best scores and given the best performances the worst scores. In my math example, I divided the training group into 5 subgroups and gave each one a scoring guide. Each group said the guide was great. I then gave each group a student test to grade, and the 5 groups came up with scores of 98, 87, 56, 27 and 0 (I don't remember each one exactly.) Each group was satisfied with those results until I told them that they had all graded the same test. I asked them to just look at the student's work and tell how he did based on their common sense, and they all said he had done just great--even the group that had just happily scored him at the 0 level! Their common sense, with no training at all, was both reliable and much more valid than the supposedly objective system they had used.
If you go to the College Board website and register, you can download released examples of the open (performance) questions from old Advanced Placement (AP) exams. You can download the scoring guides, which tell evaluators how to score performances on a 9-point scale. You will be shocked at how subjective and non-objective those scoring guides are. All student performances are scored by two graders, and those two graders will agree on the same number on that 9-point scale more than 90% of the time. That is because of the training they receive prior to becoming graders, and that training is roughly the same as the training a scuba instructor receives during training.
