When are we gonna learn?

[sunshower]

When was the bar lowered? The Advanced Open Water certification was created about 50 years ago, and it is still pretty much he same as it was then. Are you saying that the dive shop did not know what the requirements are for this certification and was fooled by the name?

It's been lowered over time. I assume the dive shop certified him in accordance with the applicable standards. The fact that this thread exists doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the standards, regardless of how long they've been in place.

 

[boulderjohn]

It's been lowered over time. I assume the dive shop certified him in accordance with the applicable standards. The fact that this thread exists doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the standards, regardless of how long they've been in place.

When was it lowered over that time--I am not aware of any such changes in he standards? It also does not matter, since your post implied that the problem was that the dive shop thought that his skills were greater than they were becasue they were fooled by the fact that he had AOW certification.

 

[CuzzA]

When was it lowered over that time--I am not aware of any such changes in he standards? It also does not matter, since your post implied that the problem was that the dive shop thought that his skills were greater than they were becasue they were fooled by the fact that he had AOW certification.

John, don't you think it's time that agencies change AOW and even the DEEP course? I read the PADI deep manual and the IANTD deep manual and I gotta say the content was night and day. I don't want to start an agency bashing tangent, but boy what a difference in the approach to instruction.

Case and point... In the PADI deep course they teach divers to descend vertical feet first to avoid getting disoriented. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I read in scuba instruction. Most of the manual was just regurgitated basic open water material. Focusing on things like color change at depth because there's less light. WTH? Meanwhile IANTD's manual was hammering how to break panic response, how mindset and psychology of the diver plays a role, especially with narcosis, how to effectively plan a deep dive and emergency decompression procedures, etc. The PADI approach was rainbows and sunshine (tourist) while IANTD was thunder and lightning (diver).

AOW is a joke. Plain and simple. It could be great, but not the way it is designed. I understand the original intention of exposing divers to different "adventures", but the skills gained are minimal and likely result in new divers and ops being overconfident about a divers ability.

Again, I'm not trying to start an agency bashing war, but this has to be considered.

 

[boulderjohn]

John, don't you think it's time that agencies change AOW and even the DEEP course?

Your post is completely off topic for this thread, but I will respond briefly.

I assume you are talking about the deep dive in the PADI AOW course, which is designed only as an introduction. You can also take the deep diver specialty, or you can take the full deep diver course, which goes through two gas decompression. I don't know the IANTD curriculum, so I don't know what you are comparing it to.

 

[CuzzA]

Your post is completely off topic for this thread, but I will respond briefly.

I assume you are talking about the deep dive in the PADI AOW course, which is designed only as an introduction. You can also take the deep diver specialty, or you can take the full deep diver course, which goes through two gas decompression. I don't know the IANTD curriculum, so I don't know what you are comparing it to.

Not really. I was talking about AOW and the full Deep Diver course in response to your statement "they were fooled by his AOW cert."

My point relating to this thread and incident is the false sense of confidence due to the AOW cert the way the course is taught. Because there is nothing advanced about AOW and it teaches very little to "advance" a divers ability to take on more difficult dives.

 

[Kharon]

... What agency are you guys talking about because I got my AOW after 7 dives through padi. It is just another class with 5 different dives to try and get people interested in diving and expand to 100ft.

Interesting. SDI requires 5 additional certifications (not dives - complete courses) and at least 25 dives to get AOW. I guess PADI isn't concerned about proficiency - only dollars. No one with 7 dives is advanced - sorry. That cert is bogus.

 

[Hank49]

It would be a good practice for any shop to take any divers, regardless of cert level, on check out dives before taking them to sites with strong current etc etc.

 

[sunshower]

When was it lowered over that time--I am not aware of any such changes in he standards? It also does not matter, since your post implied that the problem was that the dive shop thought that his skills were greater than they were becasue they were fooled by the fact that he had AOW certification.

For clarification, I was not intending to comment on the shop's role; I don't know what I think about that. My comment was directed at the industry at large.

I'm not prepared to walk through a year-by-year accounting of dive standards but I have read about what training was like for basic OW in the 60s, I know what it was like when I did it around 1990 and I know what it's like now. I know it's way easier now than it used to be; for crying out loud we're at the point of smiley faces. Making it easier for people to get more certifications may help keep people engaged and may help dive shops from a business perspective, there's genuine legitimacy to that, but it also sets up some people to get in over their heads. I think the industry could find a way to make the Advanced certification more challenging without doing tremendous harm from a business perspective. That sounds like a good thing to me.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

It's too easy to blame the industry. But pretty much all the agencies create their curriculum to be suitable for their largest demographic ... the occasional tropical diver who does mostly guided dives in relatively benign conditions. And for that diver, the curriculum is perfectly fine. It's the people who dive in more challenging conditions who need more. When I became an instructor I purchased the "library" of instructor guides, and when I saw what NAUI offered for their Advanced Scuba Diver class, decided it wasn't enough for what we were expecting our local divers to be capable of doing. So I wrote my own material, and with NAUI's blessing offered it to my Advanced students.

Over the years I had students come from out of state ... some from as far away as Minnesota, Colorado, and in one case North Carolina ... to take that class. What that tells me is there's a market out there for a more demanding class. But it requires a business to offer what people want to buy ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[dumpsterDiver]

When was the bar lowered? The Advanced Open Water certification was created about 50 years ago, and it is still pretty much he same as it was then. Are you saying that the dive shop did not know what the requirements are for this certification and was fooled by the name?

when was the bar lowered? Seriously? When i took the most basic scuba class for a Junior certification (in 1973) the PADI course was 10 weeks long with 10 pool sessions and 10 lectures.. I think it was 1.5 hours or so of each. The required knowledge in this most basic class was essentially the same information that was required for a PADI instructor in 1987 or so when I became an instructor. There has a been a huge reduction in the "height of the bar" as PADI has watered down the aquatic perfomance standards, the academics and also the performance criteria in open water. It is amazing to hear such claims of "still pretty much the same".

I never heard about an advanced course when I was taking my first PADI class. Maybe they had them, I don't know, but within 18 months, with just a junior certification class and some mentoring and no additional classes, I was diving double tanks, a dry suit on wrecks in NJ to the limits of the recreational depth (solo at 15 yrs old). Do we feel comfortable having our AOW (let alone OW) students diving like that with the current PADI class structure? The training i received in the most basic class, prepared me for that type of diving.

I don't think i should have to go into all the details of the changes I saw, but they were significant.

Maybe you can argue that the current instruction format is more "educationally valid", more efficiennt or any other educational mumbo jumbo.. but the bar has been lowered - i see PADI instructors that i serious doubt could pass the basic scuba class I took as a teenager.