How many students fail your course?

[boulderjohn]

My comments above describe how it is supposed to work. When you see a new diver who is ill-prepared, that could be for a variety of reasons, none of which are valid.

• A dive shop/instructor can schedule too little time for adequate instruction (pools cost money) and pressure instructors to get students finished in that time no matter what.
• A dive shop can tell instructors to skip certain standards in order to save time. That is what happened to me in my own certification, and I did not realize it until I became a professional myself years later.
• An instructor can allow a student to pass on skills for which the student is clearly not proficient.

 

[boulderjohn]

The instructor told me he never takes people to the small, warm water diving spot that is quite popular near here and where people pass off things like navigation in a thermal crater that's not even very wide, but instead he takes them to a big reservoir where they actually have to prove they can do their skills. The next time I take a course where I want to learn well, I'm going to ask for that guy. Because I think he will fail me if I'm unsafe.

Utah? If so, I know what you are talking about. People do the deep dive for AOW there, too. At 65 feet, it is technically deep enough to qualify, but I won't do it there.

He should not "fail" you, but he should not pass you, either.

I had two friends take AOW from me during a trip to Florida, and we did the navigation dive on the second of a 2-tank boat dive. I could not get the two of them through the required skills in the amount of time we had for the dive. That afternoon, we went to the beach, where the one who was struggling with the compass square exercise did one big square after another after another after another. The next day we finished the navigation skills on another dive. They did not "fail" the course the first time--they just didn't pass it until the next dive.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I was at my local dive shop taking a Nitrox course, which involved reading a book and then passing a written test, and also sort of testing a tank's air mix (standard going through the motions training), and while I was taking the written test a couple of instructors came in to chat with the owner, and I got to chatting with one of the instructors. The instructor told me he never takes people to the small, warm water diving spot that is quite popular near here and where people pass off things like navigation in a thermal crater that's not even very wide, but instead he takes them to a big reservoir where they actually have to prove they can do their skills. The next time I take a course where I want to learn well, I'm going to ask for that guy. Because I think he will work with me until I master the skills and am safe.

Fixed it for you.

 

[boulderjohn]

You pay for one week of coaching. If you do not meet standards, you will know enough to practice on your own and return for an evaluation!

I wanted to address this separately.

To a certain extent this is true, but go back to the explanation I made on curriculum design. In a properly designed course in any subject, a properly motivated student who had the necessary prerequisite skills should be expected to complete the course satisfactorily in the time allotted. There will be some exceptions, but if you have a large number of well-motivated, hard working students failing a class in the time allotted, then something is very wrong, and it is nothing to brag about.

The problem with a course with a lot of failures of motivated students could be any combination of the following:

• The students are not properly screened and have been accepted into the class without the proper prerequisite skills.
• The course is badly designed and does not have a sound sequence of instruction.
• The course is badly designed and has an unrealistic set of requirements given the allotted time frame for the course.
• The instructor is doing a particularly poor job.

I will go further to say that if a course costs a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time, if students who do not complete the course have to pay for another course, and if the instructor knows going into the class that there is a very good chance that students will fail and have to repeat the course for additional money, then I have a serious problem with the morality of the program. Yes, there may be times that some students do need enough additional time that extra payment may be necessary, but if that is a common occurrence, then the program needs to look at its structure to see why and remedy that problem.

 

[Hoag]

I don't know if you would count this as "Failing" the course, but during my OW course, the instructor had what some might call a "Heart-to-heart chat" with one of the students. (Others might call it a "Come to J***s meeting".) Apparently the instructor told the student that they were just not getting it and if he was to continue on to the Open Water dives then they would possibly be putting others at risk as he flailed about totally out of control. The instructor told the student that the shop would refund the cost of the course if the student withdrew immediately, but to proceed any further, would be non-productive and a waste of both the instructor's and the student's time.

The student admitted that the instructor was probably right and took the refund.

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

I wanted to address this separately.

To a certain extent this is true, but go back to the explanation I made on curriculum design. In a properly designed course in any subject, a properly motivated student who had the necessary prerequisite skills should be expected to complete the course satisfactorily in the time allotted. There will be some exceptions, but if you have a large number of well-motivated, hard working students failing a class in the time allotted, then something is very wrong, and it is nothing to brag about.

The problem with a course with a lot of failures of motivated students could be any combination of the following:

• The students are not properly screened and have been accepted into the class without the proper prerequisite skills.
• The course is badly designed and does not have a sound sequence of instruction.
• The course is badly designed and has an unrealistic set of requirements given the allotted time frame for the course.
• The instructor is doing a particularly poor job.

I will go further to say that if a course costs a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time, if students who do not complete the course have to pay for another course, and if the instructor knows going into the class that there is a very good chance that students will fail and have to repeat the course for additional money, then I have a serious problem with the morality of the program. Yes, there may be times that some students do need enough additional time that extra payment may be necessary, but if that is a common occurrence, then the program needs to look at its structure to see why and remedy that problem.

More than 40% people fail the driving test.
More than 30% people fail the high school.
Close to 10% fail the US immigration test.

Why is it that the same population takes scuba and achieves a near 100% pass rate? Are we all naturally inclined for scuba diving more so than driving a car or doing arithmetic? Or is it because dive courses are designed to create customers for dive gear and that is why standards are written to ensure that everyone passes?

 

[Superlyte27]

Call it what you want, but if you didn't pass, you failed...at least at the completion of the original time allotted.

I'd guess 20-30% of my tech students don't pass their first time. I don't teach rec classes.

I'd wonder what percentage of gue students get a tech pass their first try at fundies.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Call it what you want, but if you didn't pass, you failed...at least at the completion of the original time allotted.

I'd guess 20-30% of my tech students don't pass their first time. I don't teach rec classes.

I'd wonder what percentage of gue students get a tech pass their first try at fundies.

I'd argue that tech is a whole different ballgame as the distance to serious injury/death is much shorter/faster. That is where the fail rate needs to be high and/or the courses are much more exhaustive (I lament the fact that not all agencies have gatekeeper skills courses like GUE, UTD, and ISE).

For most people, they just want to float in the water, follow a guide, and look at pretty fish once a year or so. That large part of the market is why I think standards are so low. Honestly, I wish many people would be just certified at the scuba diver level if they are not competent to dive without a guide.

 

[divinh]

Almost all agencies now use an educational approach modeled on Benjamin Bloom's concept of Mastery Learning. In mastery learning, the students keep working on skills until they master them. They thus never fail--they are always still working toward a goal. Students who do not pass such classes do not fail them--they just decide that the goal is not for them and stop working toward it.

Here is a quick summary of the difference:

• In traditional education, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. (We teach for a specified amount of time and then measure the student's performance to determine the results.)
• In mastery (or standards-based) education, learning is the constant and time is the variable. (We teach the students for however long it takes for them to reach the specified standard of performance, monitoring their progress and providing help all along the way.)

I suspect that the question is based on a belief in one of a handful of agencies that reject that notion, some of whom take great pride in their high failure rates, as if that means they do a better job than others. To me, that is like a plumber bragging about the high number of repairs he makes that still leak when he is done. An instructor's job is to work with a student to bring the student up to an acceptable level of performance, not merely to assess the student and walk away.

Mastery. That's the philosophy I go by. When work sent me to train eight new recruits (not in diving), I treated them as if they were going to be coworkers that need to get up to speed so that we can /all/ get the work done together. They weren't hired by the company yet. The feedback after the class and job availability determined whether they would be actually hired or not, but I treated them all like new coworkers. I also told them to take breaks whenever they needed and should help each other in learning the skills. (The latter failed once as one person didn't quite get something, thought he did, and instructed the others in the same method.) The goal was to make everyone proficient.

 

[northernone]

Echoing poorly what @boulderjohn skillfully described here is my approach as an instructor:

I fail none. If the student is willing I'll go with them as far as I am able. For some that just getting their feet in the water, others it's exceeding multiple certification standards. It's a mentorship model of learning which I love.

Thankfully, I don't have a product to sell or a try to cram all the students into an assembly line training model with a fixed training duration and am not selling courses.

If the student who wants to pass indeed fails it is the instruction model that has failed them. I'm not screening emigrants or giving a driving exam for a government. I'm sharing how to safely breathe underwater in a hobby context.

Teaching a 'tough' ' class with a high washout rate might make some instructors feel superior, but I do believe frequent failure is a symptom of a failed training method or model.

I'm coming from the context of adaptive diving where the goal is bigger than a c-card and passing a course. The dive conditions are also more challenging.

This might significantly flavor my perspective.

Cameron