I'd wonder what percentage of gue students get a tech pass their first try at fundies.
I’m not an instructor, but GUE does publish some figures in their annual reports (
Annual Reports). Unfortunately the format and level of details varies by year, but if you connect the dots it gives a good picture.
Fundamentals
Most useful info is in the 2016 report, average pass rate of 78% for fundamentals over a 10 year period. For 2016, it appears that out of the passes, 62% were Rec pass and 38% were Tech pass. That would indicate that for 2016, 32% received a Tech pass on their first go at Fundamentals. If you run the numbers for the other, more representative years, it points to ~23% for Tech pass on the first go.
Technical
Not much more info given, but extrapolating from the classes I took (eg one of my Cave 1 peers didnt pass), or from other folk I know, I appears the most common reason for failing the higher level classes is not diving/practicing enough since Fundies. Thus going into C1/T1 with skills worse than when passing Fundies.
Recreational
Note that a pass in Rec1 gives you a Fundamentals Rec pass from the get go (and in extremely rare cases in theory even a Tech pass although I’d guess that is extremely rare). I’d also wager that GUE Rec1 is only taken by dedicated spouses of committed GUE divers. To someone new to the sport it would seem horribly expensive and long compared to eg PADI, even though you get a lot more for your money. Eg it includes Nitrox, deeper max depth, maybe even a rescue primer (not sure). Also the standards are significantly higher than those of Recreational focused agencies (a topic with pros and cons that would probably warrant its own thread).
But given that almost nobody takes this course I’d say there isnt enough meaningful data to draw conclusions on GUEs recreational curriculum. GUE remains a cave/tech plus project/exploration focused agency in my book.