Role of Standards in SCUBA Diver Training

[I Dive]

Point taken. Thanks for your comment. I take it that you feel an instructor should at least teach to the minimum standards of their organization...

You are quite perceptive!

 

[dwhthediver]

I believe the standards do help insure safety (i.e. max student counts and what environments you take students into) nowhere in my instructors manual does it say anywhere I can't teach BEYOND the standards, and I do to make o/w students divers, not just someone who swims and breathes underwater

 

[Walter]

a) Follow the standards dilegently

Yes, but one should also be looking for ways to improve the class by exceeding the standards.

b) Consider the agency standards as guidelines only

They are guidelines, but one should never allow any portion of the class to voilate the standards because while they are guidelines, they are more than guidelines, they are requirements.

c) Forget about the standards completely and do his/her own thing

That's silly. When one becomes an instructor, there is an agreement to follow the standards of one's agency.

Should liability be a consideration?

Liability should always be a consideration, but if the instructor is teaching a good class (which will almost always include exceeding standards) and exercising care, liability should be a minor concern.

I think "standards" in general should be regarded as "the bare minimum" that an instructor should meet, not "the best an instructor should aim for."

Agreed.

you can't invent skills and activity in your course that do not exist in the standards and measure your students against those, as those exercises actually are not part of your training agency class.

Sure I can. It all depends on the standards of your agency. There are some standards under which your statement is true, but there are others under which it is not true. Your statement is too broad. I do add skills to my class that are not in SEI's standards. I measure my students to those additional skills and I require them to be passed to my satisfaction or the student does not receive a certification. I do that without violating standards. SEI is not the only agency for which this is true.

Over the years however all certification agencies lowered their standards in an effort to become more competitive with the PADI monster.

Not all.

 

[lord.harshil]

I have a feeling the casual discarding of standards is unfortunately way too commonplace. I will introduce my OW course experience and Instructor as evidence. He tried taking us 50 feet down into a cavern on OW dive number 1. Two of the three students joined him into the cavern, I was not one of them. He had decided that was a "Kiddie Cavern" (his exact words in the dive brief) and therefore no problem to take students into on OW1. I'm not even talking about towards the end of OW 1, I mean we descended on OW1 and headed straight to the cavern. As soon as I saw them enter, I realized it was a bad idea and turned around. Well, that's not quite correct. When I saw them enter, I either became claustrophobic at that point in time or learned that I have claustrophobia, I'm not sure which. I have never in my life experienced claustrophobia but I sure did the moment I saw them disappear into that hole. That was the worst feeling of my entire life. That was it for me, I was done with that dive so I turned around. Here I was a student on OW1 doing a 15 foot safety stop solo because my Instructor was showing some other students a cavern... That's right-I did my entire 3 minute safety stop all by myself, he never even bothered to come up and check on me. He later claimed he was watchng me from the cavern. I don't know if that bozo could have possibly blown any more standards on that dive than he did. But, it doesn't end there. That was OW1. That wast the last dive I did that day, seeing them go into that cavern left me with way too much of claustrophobic feeling and on top of that I was seriously pissed off at the Instructor and was in no mindset to be diving again. He told me to call him in a few days when I was feeling better so we could resched the rest of the class. I did and we rescheduled. I got up there and he congratulated me for returning. In his words, "it takes balls to get back in the water" after an experience like I had. The remainder of my class consisted of me donning gear in the water (not taking it off in the water, just donning it in the water after tosssing it over the side of the boat) and then swimming around in 15 feet of water with the other two students, while the Instructor observed us from the boat. He gave me my C card after that dive. I am not making one bit of this up, I am not exaggerating at all, I remember this all like it happened yesterday even though it was October 2005 (Cool, I just realized I'm approaching my 4 year diving anniversary!). He was an Independent Instructor so there wasn't any manager or owner I could complain to and at the time I didn't think to complain to PADI. But, I did know that my C-card was worthless and very soon after getting it in the mail I went to a shop and signed up for AOW, mainly to get more time in the water with an Instructor but also to find out what I didn't learn from the impersonator of an Instructor that taught my OW.

I realize this is (hopefully) an extreme example. But, to anyone who thinks that an Instructor should be able to make judgement calls on when to change or disregard training standards, keep in mind that abuses such as this can result. Granted, this was also a Quality Control issue in that PADI (and all agencies) need to be actively monitoring Instructors so they catch this kind of garbage but the flip side to that is that strict adherence to standards by someone else earlier in the game may have led to this idiot never even getting his Instructor card.

And i thought my OW was bad...mine abandoned the group at 22m for a swim through canyon and a glimpse of a whale shark. Whole OW group (6 of us) were separated and each of us managed to surface without a safety stop and without killing ourselves. this was OW dive 4. but yours takes the cake man.

This is why I wouldnt leave the judgement up to the instructor when enforcing the rule in the real world, because idiots do exist.

However, sometimes I also feel that given the right conditions and divers and instructors, some arbitrary standards are flexible.

 

[knotical]

One of the problems with standards, or almost anything written or spoken, is there are usually more than one interpretation. However, if instructors strive to know the standards and follow both the standards and their intent, the students should be relatively safe, and the instructor should be relatively free from liability risk. But in this imperfect world, the best we can hope for is a close approximation.

Even the best instructors will sometimes make mistakes, either forgetting a standard, or misinterpreting them. But to intentionally avoid a standard is a slippery slope.

A lot of the discussion in the other thread you mentioned seemed due to differing interpretations of standards, and to hearsay about what the standards said or meant. It's easy to rely on memory or what others tell us rather than dig back into the standards. Easy, but risky.

I spend a lot of time reviewing my agency's standards, because I care about my students, and because I care about my liability. And of course because interesting questions get raised here on ScubaBoard.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Recently (on another thread) there was extensive discussion on how a certified instructor runs a SCUBA class. Each instructor certification body allows the instructor some discretion, but standardizes how training courses are to operate.

Instructors must maintain insurance as a condition of re-certification. The policy becomes invalid if the instructor does not comply with the certification agencies training requirements. Dive shops are also routinely added as additional insureds to protect them from instructor negligence.

Although this process may appear bureaucratic, I believe that the intent of these requirements is to limit agency / instructor liability and to provide an increased level of safety during the introduction to diving or training certification process.

So here's the question. What do you believe is reasonable for an instructor to do when running a training program:

a) Follow the standards dilegently;

b) Consider the agency standards as guidelines only; or

c) Forget about the standards completely and do his/her own thing;

Should liability be a consideration?

Previously, I never considered these options and felt that if I was to teach, my agreement to follow the rules was important to my students, the certification agency concerned and the diving industry at large. From some of the comments made on the other thread (amazingly by other instructors) it makes me wonder. Perhaps times have changed and my perspective on this matter is antiquated.

What do you think? What do you expect of an Instructor?

d) Consider the agency standards as a baseline, pertaining to the minimum amount of skills and information you should teach, and add to them based on your knowledge of the local conditions you teach in and your judgement of each student's needs and abilities.

I cannot answer for other agencies, but I chose NAUI because they recognize that different environments around the world require different subsets of skills and knowledge, and they encourage their instructors to adapt their courses to local environments and teach beyond the standards (PADI also allows this, but you cannot withold certification if the PADI student meets the minimum objectives specified for the course).

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Interceptor121]

If an agency allows instructor to create new skills and measure those to achieve certification then I would say that those are guidelines not standards
I see you can do this with NAUI and SEI though I am surprised you can actually withold certification but I am not a NAUI or SEI instructor so I have no means to check it, in this case I would refer to those as guidelines as the meaning of the word standard from the cambridge dictionary
[C or U] a level of quality
This essay is not of an acceptable standard - do it again.
This piece of work is below standard/is not up to standard.
We have very high safety standards in this laboratory.
Not everyone judges success by the same standards - some people think happiness is more important than money.
Her technique became a standard against which all future methods were compared.

So standard defines the level of quality for certification if you ask for more or less you are not following that standard as that actually sets what needs to be achieved

 

[DCBC]

d) Consider the agency standards as a baseline, pertaining to the minimum amount of skills and information you should teach, and add to them based on your knowledge of the local conditions you teach in and your judgement of each student's needs and abilities.

I cannot answer for other agencies, but I chose NAUI because they recognize that different environments around the world require different subsets of skills and knowledge, and they encourage their instructors to adapt their courses to local environments and teach beyond the standards (PADI also allows this, but you cannot withold certification if the PADI student meets the minimum objectives specified for the course).

So your saying that the instructor should recognize the standards and not only meet all the training agencies standards, but exceed them.

I agree, but this seems to be a different approach that you took on the other thread about a non-certified diver giving an in-water session to his 11 year-old son?

"Might it be that this father knows his child better than we do? Well enough, perhaps, to have decided that he could handle the responsibility of using scuba equipment in a pool ... under the supervision of a parent who, in all likelihood, knows more about scuba diving than a significant percentage of diving instructors out there today?"

Am I misunderstanding something here?

 

[Kingpatzer]

Standards exist to maximize income to certifying agencies.

They relate to instruction by lowering the time and investment necessary to sell certification cards by carefully balancing the need to have the buying public thinking they are getting something for their money and the agencies desire to provide as little as possible.

Good instructors -- which are very few and far between -- abide by the standards to the extent that they meet the bureaucratic requirements presented while teaching their students.

 

[Sinbad the Diver]

I look at standards as a way of providing some comonality accross multiple agencies so that when a person has a C card, operators and other divers can begin with the premise that based on that card, that diver is able to do certain things and has a certain knowledge foundation. Obviously, if instructors go off on their own and ignore those standards, that assumption is not valid. I am obviously not saying that this means that having a C Card means you are a competent diver, but if everyone followed the standards in training, you would at least have an idea the minumum they should know and be able to do.

If you do not agree with the standards of an agency and don't want to teach them (at a minimum, going beyond I would consider a good thing) then you should find another agency to instruct for and if you can't find one that you agree with, some soul searching in why all the agencies think differently than you.