Advanced Open Water Disappointment

[boulderjohn]

if a driving school sucks and students can’t pass the drivers exam, what do you think happens to those businesses? But, the catch is that the driving school doesn’t issue the drivers license, you have to go into DMV snd take their test and be drive tested by a DMV employee.
The problem in scuba is it’s the same crooks doing the training (or NOT doing the training) that issue the plastic. Where is the oversight?

It seems as if you are indeed calling for government oversight, such as you have with a driver's license. The difference, of course, is that driver's licenses are regulated by state governments. Since scuba certifications are international, we would have to have an international governmental agency overseeing it, Students completing their classes would have to go to the nearest bureau of this international agency to get their certifications.

I winder how much that would cost. I wonder who would pay for it. Any ideas?

 

[Angelo Farina]

It seems as if you are indeed calling for government oversight, such as you have with a driver's license.

No need to involve the government.
I am a Cmas instructor. When teaching in my club (for free and for several months), at the end of the course the exam was performed by another Cmas instructor coming from another town and chosen by the agency's headquarters.
As the examiner was teaching in a competing diving school, he/she did never made discounts and was quite prone to have a number of students not passing the exam, and having to repeat the course the following year..
At the time becoming certified was not easy!
Also in the current Padi-dominated environment, it would make sense if the exam is done by an examiner coming from a competing shop in another town...

 

[BlueTrin]

No need to involve the government.
I am a Cmas instructor. When teaching in my club (for free and for several months), at the end of the course the exam was performed by another Cmas instructor coming from another town and chosen by the agency's headquarters.
As the examiner was teaching in a competing diving school, he/she did never made discounts and was quite prone to have a number of students not passing the exam, and having to repeat the course the following year..
At the time becoming certified was not easy!
Also in the current Padi-dominated environment, it would make sense if the exam is done by an examiner coming from a competing shop in another town...

That’s an interesting idea.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

It seems as if you are indeed calling for government oversight, such as you have with a driver's license. The difference, of course, is that driver's licenses are regulated by state governments. Since scuba certifications are international, we would have to have an international governmental agency overseeing it, Students completing their classes would have to go to the nearest bureau of this international agency to get their certifications.

I winder how much that would cost. I wonder who would pay for it. Any ideas?

No, I’m absolutely not calling for government oversight, I just used that as an example because I couldn’t think of anything else. The problem would be if scuba certification became the domain of the government and you were caught diving without a certification you could be legally cited like driving without a license. Nobody wants that.

Why not think outside the box and create a private agency that follows all the WRSTC guideline (since they are already in place), and make this new agency a test only agency. You could call it something like the NSTA (National Scuba Testing Assoc.). You obtain the knowledge of how to dive on your own: private instructor, your grandpa, a parent, a dive club, reading books/self study, etc. you practice stuff in a pool, you could learn to skin dive on your own - nothing stopping you.
When you feel you are ready you make an online appt and go in for your written exam, your pool skills test, then somehwere somehow your OW checkout dives. All this for a fee of course.
There would be no cheating, either you pass or you don’t.
Make up the rules and the difficulty as you wish.
When you get on a dive boat and they see you were tested by the NSTA, it means something. They would be confident that you passed everything you needed to and nobody just slides by.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

What we need to do is look to the models that are working for inspiration. We need to look to all the businesses that have nothing but honest, hard-working employees who never bend the rules. We need to find the areas of business in which none of the local business owners cur corners to make money. Let's start right now by listing those businesses so we can see how they work and apply those lessons to the scuba industry. Let's dedicate the next few pages of this thread to identifying the role models.

There are two things that are used in business to keep things operating smoothly and with integrity,
A carrot and a stick.
In the scuba industry there seems to be a lack of both.

 

[boulderjohn]

Here in Colorado, we already have most of our students checked by a different instructor. Do to our dearth of local dive facilities, about 80% of our students are actually certified by instructors around the world, taking referrals from Colorado instructors. Even the ones we do in0house have different instructors. A dive shop's instructional schedule will have dates for classroom/pool sessions and dates for OW sessions. You are not assigned students classroom through OW, so it is very rare for a student to do the OW certification dives with the same instructor for the classroom/pool work. I sent many students off to be certified by someone else. I certified many students I had not seen until the OW certification dives. I only took a few dozen all the way through.

 

[L13]

Your problem, as before, is your absolutist thinking. Look at your question: "Where has self regulation ever worked?" The problem is that your definition of "worked" is perfection. If there is a flaw to be found anywhere, it means the system doesn't work.

By my standards, the current system, as flawed as it is, is "working" good enough that government involvement would make it worse.

 

[L13]

No need to involve the government.
I am a Cmas instructor. When teaching in my club ...

Exactly! there are many better choices than getting the government involved.

 

[L13]

No, I’m absolutely not calling for government oversight, I just used that as an example because I couldn’t think of anything else. The problem would be if scuba certification became the domain of the government and you were caught diving without a certification you could be legally cited like driving without a license. Nobody wants that.

Why not think outside the box and create a private agency that follows all the WRSTC guideline (since they are already in place), and make this new agency a test only agency. You could call it something like the NSTA (National Scuba Testing Assoc.). You obtain the knowledge of how to dive on your own: private instructor, your grandpa, a parent, a dive club, reading books/self study, etc. you practice stuff in a pool, you could learn to skin dive on your own - nothing stopping you.
When you feel you are ready you make an online appt and go in for your written exam, your pool skills test, then somehwere somehow your OW checkout dives.

Great idea, until:

All this for a fee of course.

This is where it breaks down. It costs money to run an organization.
(but the cost wouldn't have to be much if done well and with volunteer examiners, etc)

There would be no cheating, either you pass or you don’t.

I doubt you could completely stop cheating, but you could minimize it.

Make up the rules and the difficulty as you wish.
When you get on a dive boat and they see you were tested by the NSTA, it means something. They would be confident that you passed everything you needed to and nobody just slides by.

 

[boulderjohn]

I wrote this story somewhere not long ago--maybe earlier in this lengthy thread.

A teacher where I worked decided too many students were working too many hours in part time jobs, and she thought that might be a reason for the number of chronically failing students. She convinced school leadership to embark on an ambitious campaign to do whatever it took to cut down on part time jobs to improve student performance. The first step was to get the data, so the school did an exhaustive survey so they could correlate student work hours with academic performance.

The results were staggering, but not as expected. Work hours did indeed correlate with student performance. In general, the more hours worked, the better the student was doing. The students chronically failing classes weren't doing part time jobs, either. The perceived problem did not exist; the system was working well.

So to all who want to impose a massive and highly expensive system on scuba to solve its problems, how do you know the problem exists to the point that it is necessary? Well over a million certifications are completed every year world-wide. Of course there will be some problems, but do those problems exist to the point that we need to make such huge changes to the system?