Role of Standards in SCUBA Diver Training

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?

DCBC:

Role of Standards in SCUBA Diver Training?

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Setting aside whether any particular standard is proper/sufficient/etc, 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."

Sort of like "minimum daily requirements" on a food label. Trace amounts of required nutrients may well be sufficient to sustain life, but simply ingesting those trace amounts and no more, does not equate to "eating a healthy diet."

DCBC:

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 were important to my students, the certification industry and the diving industry at large. From some of the comments on the other thread (some by other instructors) it makes me wonder. Perhaps times have changed and my perspective on this matter may be antiquated.

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

Click to expand...

If you ask me, in the ideal world, with ideal instructors who have the knowledge and ability to make good judgement calls (ie. the instructors arent just 100 30min dives under their belt type instructors) then agency standards are a guideline with the ultimate decision left up to the instructor.

In our world as it is now, even enforcing guidelines to the T will not result in completely sieving out the bad instructors and there will be clowns who screw it up for newbies so the question is moot.

Best compromise in our times?

To the instructors : Follow the guidelines.

To the students : Find a good, reputable instructor and talk to him before you dive with him.

If you deliver a course sanctioned by a training agency you must adhere to the standards.
Standards not only contain performance requirements but also stipulate what you can or can't do in terms of the way you conduct the training itself, in the classroom, the pool and the ocean

Of course you have to tailor the course to the local conditions and culture where you teach however 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.

In essence to give more value you can deliver additional information into your classes, ask the students to perform optional exercises in the pool if they want, and have a specific conduct during your open water as long as you don't measure the students against those additional tasks to a point that failing would mean not achieving the certification, however you would withold certification if the student fails a performance requirement in the standards until the student achieves that.
Which means that if in a class the student passes your bespoke exercises but fails one of those in the standards the student can't achieve certification even if your bespoke exercises were really hard or difficult.
Also you should explain that the information or tasks are additional to the course to justify why they don't appear in the literature and ensure safety is mantained at all times and no unreasonable requests are put forward to the students
A point worth mentioning is that the judgement call with regards to this additional content is very important. I have seen instructors bombarding the students in the classroom with their way to understand a concept (diving table are a classic) and ending up confusing the students more.
Especially when it comes to the knowledge part we are safe to assume the majority of the instructors are not scientists and their knowledge is of practical nature and their classroom presentation skills are worse than those inwater. So I am in general skeptical towards instructors conducting lessons as opposed to students doing self learning on material developed by training agency at cost of million $$$

lord.harshil:

If you ask me, in the ideal world, with ideal instructors who have the knowledge and ability to make good judgement calls (ie. the instructors arent just 100 30min dives under their belt type instructors) then agency standards are a guideline with the ultimate decision left up to the instructor.

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So are you saying that:
1/ New instructors should follow the standards as written;
2/ Experienced instructors, just use them as a guideline only?

If this was followed, how does this affect the standardization of training by the organizations? What about liability?

What does this say about instructor certification minimum requirements? It would appear that you feel these insufficient (I would agree, but would not just limit this to instructor requirements). What do you suggest be done?

Standards are not guidelines otherwise they would not be called standards
You must deliver the standards as a minimum but you are free to add value if appropriate and there is no risk or added safety concern to the student

DCBC:

So are you saying that:
1/ New instructors should follow the standards as written;
2/ Experienced instructors, just use them as a guideline only?

If this was followed, how does this affect the standardization of training by the organizations? What about liability?

What does this say about instructor certification minimum requirements? It would appear that you feel these insufficient (I would agree, but would not just limit this to instructor requirements). What do you suggest be done?

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Its hard to do anything really. The world is full of selfish c*nts. Agencies (most of them anyway) just want to make money as do a lot of instructors and dive shops so they make courses ridiculously easy and problems happen. How will 5 hours in a pool with 1 instructor to 8 students ensure that they will be prepared for the unpredictable nature of the ocean? No way. Fail.

Most students don't understand how dangerous scuba can really be. They think making a mistake is like falling off a bicycle, no big deal. Hence they are fine with short courses since they don't know any better. If the courses were longer, lets say maybe 5 pool sessions and 20 open water dives to certify a diver, how many students would actually go ahead with the course? LDS and instructors wont be able to churn out students anymore, prices will skyrocket, shops will close. Capitalism has made the courses a bit too short and I'm surprised divers aren't dying like flies all over the place.

There is no way to define an experienced instructor by arbitrary limits. An instructor with 100 dives could be damn good while another with 500 could be the laziest most incompetent fella around.

Liability wise, there have been people with ridiculously cases who have won and I'd blame the justice system rather than the instructors themselves. They've done everything possible to cover their butts and the only way to keep doing this is to follow the predefined standards as defined by the capitalist agencies. Its pointless to argue this point because self always comes before the benefit of students.

The best real world way of handling this is, like I said, increase awareness in students on how to choose the good instructors. Lets say 90% of new students read the Scubaboard Guideline on Choosing Instructors and the bad instructors will automatically be weeded out. Other than that, life sucks live with it and help individual divers on a case by case basis.

What more can we do anyway?

lord.harshil:

What more can we do anyway?

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You make some excellent points. Historically courses were longer and standards were higher. In Canada at least, diver training was mainly undertaken by Dive Clubs. Instructors donated their time.

My basic SCUBA course was almost a year long (1.5 hours classroom, 2 hours pool per week). The swimming test was 400 m (4 side stroke, 4 crawl, 4 breast, 4 any stroke) plus 200 m on your back, 30 min drown proof, 25 m u/w swim; so you had to be a reasonably good swimmer before you got into diving. This discouraged many and others worked to improve their fitness and in-water abilities over a period of time. After all, there was no rush... Other subsequent courses were much more intensive.

But with PADIs expansion, things started to change. The standards were lowered and diving became commercialized. Dive shops became prevalent and with the competition for students, the race was on.

Before it didn't matter what NAUI, ACUC or BSAC instructor you received your training from, you could count on a standard of excellence. The card said it all. Over the years however all certification agencies lowered their standards in an effort to become more competitive with the PADI monster.

I understand how in today's society, that a diving body would want to conform or die. Certainly the increase in new technologies has mitigated the need for such high standards (which is arguable). Today's society wants what it wants, 5 mins ago and has little patience for waiting for anything. Our society has created an instant world where value is only seen as "the lowest price," or the fastest route. The idea that you only get what you pay for, and pay for what you get seems to have eluded the majority, but I digress....

I'm not satisfied with the current situation anymore than (from what I can gather) you are. There has to be some sort of workable solution...

As far as my original question is concerned, it's a matter of understanding expectations and that is what sparked my question. In today's Society (given the situation), what is reasonable? The agencies can make standards and the courts can assess liability based upon "standard of care" (which largely depends upon what is reasonable). The agencies can do there part, but if the instructor drops the ball (or simply chooses to disregard the agencies standards), where does that leave us?

Sorry for the diversion and such a winded reply...

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.

I Dive:

...that strict adherence to standards by someone else earlier in the game may have led to this idiot never even getting his Instructor card.

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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...