Is there a "hardest cert/most stringent certifier?"

[KevinNM]

The question then should not be if GUE's newly graduated Cave 1 diver is better than an NACD newbie graduate Full Cave diver because they are half the price of each other. The question should be if GUE's Cave 1 diver better than an NACD Cave diver with 170 - 200 real dives under his belt because they are both created in the same money.

I will point out I took a fundamentals 2 course with a guy who had full cave from some agency (never asked). We both got provisional passes, which means you didn't meet the standards for a rec level pass but the instructor thinks you probably can meet the rec standards within 6 months. (I already had a rec pass in a single - I took it to work on doubles without any expectation of getting a tech pass - though I was expecting to do better than I did - but I got a lot of useful criticism.) So it's possible to get full cave without having the level of skill that GUE expects from an open water diver. Not that he was terrible or anything, but he couldn't consistently do the skills without having something go wrong.

 

[Ayisha]

If there is a difference in agencies, what who/which has the hardest training? I don't want to take the easiest route, but I'd rather be trained by the best. Is that a thing anymore? Thanks.

+1 for GUE (Global Underwater Explorers). It's training that will make you a more proficient, better diver and most everyone needs to work for it, no matter how long you've been diving, how many dives you have or how good you appear to be already. Everyone can learn from it. They really try to maintain the highest standards to assure consistency among instructors and those they certify. The instructor is very important, but inconsistency is less likely among GUE instructors.

I have GUE Fundamentals and I am a single tank diver. I'm not a tech diver and have no desire to be a cave diver at this time or anywhere in the near future, if ever. Despite popular opinion, GUE is not only for tech divers. It is for those who want to improve their diving to a whole other level of proficiency.

GUE Fundamentals is the starting place for an already certified diver, and it is more expensive, but it can also be longer and more encompassing. For someone who does not already have them, it can include nitrox training, peak performance buoyancy training, drysuit training, doubles training if you take the class in doubles, etc. As said previously as well, there is a time commitment depending on how much practice you want or need to do.

 

[AJ]

He didn't tell her what she did wrong. He didn't tell her how to fix it. He didn't tell her how to avoid it in the future. All three of those things are things that ingraned from day 1 in to the DNA of most recreational instructors.

This is not GUE specific, but a instructor specific attitude.I have seen rec instructors flipping also making students cry. My experience with GUE is very different. I love GUE training because of the excellent training my instructor gave us. He gave us tools to improve as a diver far beyond rec training. Yes, they tell you what's wrong and indeed, if you **** up you will hear it in a direct manner. But he also told us how to improve and was open for discussion on GUE Philosophy. Telling from his own experience, including his own mistakes he made during his diving career.

 

[Johanan]

RAID is worth to look at.

 

[toby43]

Generally speaking I think that there are few differences between recreational agencies beyond instructor competence aside from BSAC. BSAC does pretty much their own thing, in a strictly British context and IMO are well behind the curve when it comes to integrating emerging best practices. (and by well behind the curve I mean 15-20 years). They appear to have not kept pace since their break away from CMAS and presently, the only divers I routinely see who would appear to be further behind the curve are public safety divers on mainland Europe, some of whom are still using horse-collar BCD's because their commanders haven't discovered electricity (and therefore the internet) yet.

But I don't want to slag off BSAC for no reason. The foundations have the potential to be amazing but appear to be being held back by an estabished elite who learned to dive in the 80's (or earlier) and are reluctant (at least) to consider that the way THEY dive isn't potentially the best way. I'm sure BSAC divers on the board will have some more to say about that.

PADI, for example, also tends to lag behind the curve with respect to emerging best practices becaue they want to see PROOF that it works. However PADI DOES listen to its members and their standards are in a fairly constant state of flux as they integrate new ideas, new educational approaches and input from instructors on the ground.

Where the rubber meets the road, however, PADI cannot, and does not, control the individual actions of individual instructors. There are more than 100,000 Padi instructors on this planet and their quality control is basically built around a "click system"..... ie.... management by exception. If nobody reports an instructor for excesses then nothing will happen. This is obviously bad because there is no proactive action. On the other hand, the more people understand how important it is to report bad instructors, the better quality control will get.

As for technical agencies. I only hold certs from IANTD and TDI and in both cases the instructor makes 100% of the difference. If you think you can learn technical diving by following a checklist of skills (a standard) then you're wrong. There are skills involved but training for technical diving is, in my experience, more a matter of mentoring than training. The more advanced, the more important mentoring becomes.

GUE system is built up like that as well. Their standards differ little from IANTD or TDI (only nuances) and the origns of GUE lay in the PADI system.... but their instructors differ in some cases in attitude. I've watched GUE instructors teach and i'm not personally that impressed because I don't believe that if something is made harder that it is automatically better, but some of them can dive well enough that it even made ME think.... wow. To date, I haven't had that with IANTD or TDI instructors.

R..

Unsubstantiated criticisms of BSAC tells one more about the knowledge of poster than the agency. If you have examples to back up what you say then let' s have them, else it's just internet blather.

 

[The Chairman]

I believe that the instructor is the most important factor and not the agency. I have met GUE and UTD instructors that I would never train with and that's true for every agency. People learn to dive to have fun. Too many instructors from all agencies have lost sight of that goal and their classes reflect that.

New to an area? Ask in the respective forum right here on ScubaBoard. People will clue you in on who's fun and thorough and who's just a figjam.

 

[bamafan]

RAID is worth to look at.

I don't know much about them but I saw some videos Jill Heinerth did for them and I was not impressed by the diving. She did a good job with the film itself but the kneeling on the floor was not impressive to me and makes me doubt that their instruction is that much better than.anyone else's.

 

[boulderjohn]

The MIT/Harvard analogy is not a good one. In order to become a professor at these institutions, you have to be well above the rest in terms of how your research pushes the front of knowledge in a particular field. How well you can teach is given little consideration.

There is a "tradition" at some famous universities that pretty much every professor who gets the "best professor" rating from the students doesn't make tenure and gets fired.

Both of the above are absolutely true. A close friend told me that when he was first hired as an assistant professor at a major university, he was worried because he had only taken two education classes in his life and felt he did not know enough about teaching to be effective in the classroom. He soon learned that he was the only one in the entire department who had ever taken ANY education courses--he walked in as the resident expert on teaching theory. A few years later he got a stern warning--it looked like he might get selected as the department's teacher of the year by students surveys, and he should do what he could to avoid it. Such a distinction was considered an indication that he was devoting too much time to teaching and not enough time to research, and research grants are the reason faculty is hired. He did get the teacher of the year award, and they took him off teaching altogether the following year and put him on full research. He was told he had to shape up or tenure was out of the question. He told me all of this years later, after he had gotten tenure (barely) and eventually become a dean.

When I was in graduate school and teaching at the same university, our chancellor gave a speech in which our task as faculty members was load out clearly. We were a research institution, not a teaching institution, and that is where our priorities were to be focused. Preparing for and teaching classes was something we were to do in whatever spare time was left over from our research. Faculty members solved that problem in interesting ways. In my studies in literature, I took a Ph.D level course called "Donne and Jonson." We spent one week on some very obscure works of Donne and one week on obscure works by Jonson. the rest of the course--and our required research as graduate students--was devoted to very obscure and sometimes anonymous works of the same kind written between 1592 and 1603. The next semester, the same professor taught a masters level course called "The 17th Century." It had exactly the same syllabus. guess what that professor was researching himself?

So how does this relate to diving agencies?

As a career educator, I know well that truly effective teaching requires a tremendous amount of skill. Some people come to it easily, possibly because they themselves were trained well. (Research indicates that when people become teachers, they tend to teach the way they themselves were originally taught more than the way they were taught to teach in their educator training.) Others require a lot of training to get there. Even others seem to be immune to that training and will continue to be poor instructors no matter how much experience they have. I have seen a man who is famous for his diving experience at work as a dive instructor, and I would not recommend him to anyone. I have seen instructors for certain agencies that are supposed to excel in producing great instructors, and they are among the worse I have ever seen.

 

[boulderjohn]

I would like to add that there really is a significant difference in instructional philosophy between some agencies, and it would take a book chapter to explain the difference fully. What follows is an all too brief summary of the difference.

The most influential book on curriculum development today is Understanding by Design by Wggins and McTigue. One aspect of this is that curriculum should identify and focus on the essential Learning of a course. Think of an archery target. Course designers should identify the essential learning in the course, the important learning, the stuff that's good to know, the stuff that's nice to know, and the stuff you really don't need to know and think of them as being in the increasingly outward circles of the target. The course must be designed to ensure that learning is prioritized in that order. The stuff in the outer ring should probably be omitted entirely.

That is in large part because of interference theory. In brief, the time and effort spent learning about the stuff that you don't really need to know interferes with your ability to learn the really important stuff. This is commonly called in shorthand, "Less is more," which means that if your curriculum is overstuffed with material the student does not need to know, the student would have actually learned more in total if you had tried to teach less in the first place.

In scuba instruction, we see all of this play out in the difference between agencies that adopt what educators call a "just in time" approach as opposed to agencies that adopt a "just in case" approach. The "just in time" approach creates a course curriculum that focuses on what the student needs to be a competent and safe diver in terms of the course content, leaving out that which is not important at that time. If the student later needs to learn other stuff, then the student can learn it at the time it is needed. In a "just in case" approach, the course teaches things that will probably not be needed, but it is required anyway, just in case the student might need to know it some time in the future. An example would be instruction in diving with tides and diving at altitude. Open Water classes usually teach them very briefly and tell students to get more knowledge if those situations arise. As an instructor teaching in Colorado, the altitude situation arises immediately, so I teach it then--I have no choice. If I were teaching in Seattle, the tide situation would arise immediately, and I would have to teach it then. If I taught my Colorado students how to dive the tides in Seattle, it would not only be a waste of time for nearly 100% of them, it would make it harder for 100% of them to learn what is really important.

So some agencies have the philosophy of teaching enough to make you a safe and competent diver at that level of training, certify you at that level, and then leave it up to you to go out and attain a high level of expertise through a combination of diving experience and further training. Other agencies teach you until they believe you have a high level of expertise and will not certify you until you are at that level. Those two philosophies appeal to different kinds of students, and students are free to select the one that fits them best.

 

[PfcAJ]

I don't know much about them but I saw some videos Jill Heinerth did for them and I was not impressed by the diving. She did a good job with the film itself but the kneeling on the floor was not impressive to me and makes me doubt that their instruction is that much better than.anyone else's.

Right? I mean that's the kind of quality they want to broadcast?