Jim, are there any other options to your course? What if you have a student who simply has no desire to night dive or has no desire to search and recover an object off the bottom?
No. The options are clearly stated. If one wishes to opt out of the S&R then we can do a wreck dive at additional expense. The only other exception would be if they wished to do an additional dive from those already listed. Under SEI guidleines Deep, Nav, and Night are still required. I am helping to rewrite AOW and AOW plus guidelines to reflect the standards we wish to educate to. One thing I am pushing for is to require those as well as the Advanced Skills and make classroom mandatory. Whether that will happen is unclear. Fortunately I am free to set my prereqs and standards for entry and exit so that students actually benefit from the entire class.
The dives and classroom are set up to build on each other. That is why they are done in the order they are. If you can't do basic skills hovering and swimming with little to no change in buoyancy or work as a team and maintain CONSTANT buddy contact, the Nav exercise is a waste. And if you don't know how to effectively navigate during the day the night dive is meaningless and little more than a handholding exercise. And around here deep means dark, silty, and changes in water density due to thermoclines. Your buoyancy better be on, no vertical descents, you need to know where you are, and your light is your next best friend. The 3 previous dives all reinforce skills needed on this one. And when you are switching to the stage at 70 or 50, and it's dark and you are in midwater with the bottom at 90-100feet, that you left on the descent line in my course, all of that previous experience comes in handy.
The search and recovery dive takes all the skills from the first four and changes the task load. Now it's a bag and reel and line instead of the stage. But still you can handle it with the confidence you've just gained! You can swim 2-3 feet above the bottom and not worry about coming back through a silt cloud because there won't be any! And finally with all this new knowledge, confidence, and skill when I take your mask or your buddy's and you need to guide each other and do a safe ascent you have confidence in each other. You trust each other, You know where each one is and that they can indeed help IF needed.
I also do not have to teach anyone I don't want to . The students who take my class know up front what their options are and what I expect from them. They are free to seek out someone else if they wish. I don't do this for a living. I am not interested in churning out numbers. When a student receives a card from me they have earned it.
I am not a pretty fish junkie. I like to look at them but really don't care what they are. As such if someone comes to me asking for a fish ID class I'll tell em buy a book on Amazon. If something does not actually improve a divers skill, comfort, and safety in the water I have no desire to teach it. My equipment class can save a divers day or prevent a potentially serious problem. It has value. A boat dive for example is covered in OW class and to add it to an AOW course as a separate dive just to get a number of dives has little if any real value other than they can say they went on a boat.