Instructor or Agency or You ?

Who do you think is most responsible and has the most influence on your divetraining(course). Who is responsible for the quality of your diving skills ?

Only one answer possible... get the one you think is most important !

(oops... number two obviously had to be YouR dive instructor not you dive instructor... hehe... sorry)

I had to go with the instructor. While it's not possible for the instructor to teach a student eveything they need to know to be a SCUBA God, it is up to the instructor to teach the student what their limitations are and what more they will need to learn. In other words... the instructor sets the standard for the student's continued growth post certification. If the instructor doesn't teach effectively and make the student aware of their need to improve skills after the courtse, they likely never will.

Whether you like it or not there is more than one answer to the question. There is a chain of responsibility that we need to look at.

On the day you get your card the instructor is responsible, IMO. At this point they have been your main and maybe only source of information.

However the instructor may be in the position of being a product of his training. I see instructors who think they're doing a good job when I think they're dangerous non-diving fools. I started out as one of those, BTW.

At some point in your diving career though you are exposed to other sources of information and have the oportunity to make choices. Here you clearly have responsibility.

I believe you are responsible for yourself.

For example, my AOW instructor was HORRIBLE and if I used him as a metric I would most likely be a very bad diver. In the process of seeking more knowledge I started to see the holes in my training. I wasn't looking for problems I was simply verifying what I had been told. Somethings only need a simply bull$hit filter while others need more thought. In the end you owe it to yourself to do a minimal amount of verification on everything someone tells you.

Well, I have this opinion....

I am ultimately responsible for my own skills, training, and abilities b/c I have taken classes that I have put a lot of work into.

That being said, I also have had the fortune of being taught by some absolutely wonderful instructors, and I have worked with some great people. All of this together has combined to make me the diver I am today, and hopefully I can continue to educate my self and other students as I hope to continue my career in diving for some time.

Things are not so simple.

You are responsible for your education. OTOH, most people aren't aware there are differences.

The instructor is responsible for teaching an excellent class. OTOH, most instructors teach a poor class because they aren't aware there's another way. They can't teach what they've never learned.

The buck has to stop at the agency, but any one of the 3 can guarantee a good class.

You can get a good class by shopping around.

The instructor can teach a good class, by educating himself and refusing to accept minimums.

The agency can demand a good class by setting high standards.

Usually, none of these takes place.

I voted for yourself.

While an excellent instructor can help educate you and teach you the skills, it is ultimately up to you to keep up with the skills and practice them. It is also your personal decision to ultimately practice safe diving skills and judgement during your dives.

While I generally agree that it is up to the diver to improve their skills and knowledge once the instructor has issued the c-card and cut his minnow loose on the open waters of the world, it's still the instructor who has to plant that seed during the training.

As several have pointed out in other words... most don't seek out what they don't know they need to know (be it students, open water divers or instructors).

The problem with putting the oweness on the agency is that the angency is pretty much forced by the marketplace to cater to the least common demonimator. That's especially true in the US (unfortunately). It is for this reason, I believe, that agencies are adopting the "minimum standard" approach.

From there it's up to the instructor to evaluate whether or not a student is competent to be certified. He/She must take the time to teach the student properly and refuse to run a puppy mill. More importantly, the instructor is the ONLY entity capable of properly evaluating the student to determine if they are qualified to be certified and has to refuse to certify anyone who is not. Students can not certify themselves.

Accoridngly, any open water diver who is truly incompetent in the water is absolutely the fault of the instructor and no-one else. He/She should never have been certified. Conversely, good divers are not necessarily the product of good instructors. Some are, some are self created and others are the product of good dive buddies and/or continuing education.

So, I suppose, it might be more accurate to say that the instuctor is ultimately responsible for nearly all bad divers but a majority of good divers are responsible for themselves.

"The problem with putting the oweness <sic> on the agency is that the angency <sic> is pretty much forced by the marketplace to cater to the least common demonimator."

How is that different from pressure put on individual instructors?

The agency has a responsibility to set high standards. Unfortunately, it doesn't always happen.

The instructor has a responsibility to teach the best class he knows how to teach. In most cases, all he knows about teaching and about diving, he learned from his agency.

You have a responsibilty to learn everything presented, to practice and stay current on skills. Unfortunately, there were probably critical skills left out of your class. Reseach prior to taking your class could have prevented that, but few research classes beyond price and schedule.

Walter once bubbled...
"The problem with putting the oweness on the agency is that the angency is pretty much forced by the marketplace to cater to the least common demonimator."

How is that different from pressure put on individual instructors?

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Click to expand...

It differs in that you can not expect every open water student to be a dive master. There has to be some minimum standard that the market will tolerate as an entry level that is both sufficient to keep divers reasonably safe while at the same time not setitng the standard so high that it is functionally unattainable for the majority.

It is my personal belief that the existing set of minimum standards are sufficient to achieve that balance. But that a failure to adhere to those standards is the crux of the problem. If you like, you could put the oweness back to the agency by insisting they somehow evaluate every student and instructor to ensure the standard they set forth is being met in every case, but that's entirely unrealistic in the real world.

It is up to the instructor to ensure that the diver's he/she is creating are both reasonably competent and very much aware of their own shortcomings. IN the real world, the majority of customers are not going to spend much if any time researching what it is that's expected of them in the process. They trust the instructor/shop/agency to have that knowledge.

Ultimately, the instrucot is the one entirely in control of what sort of student is produced. That is the one individual in the chain that both (a) should know the standards and what will be expected of the diver in the future and (b) what has been taught to the student and the student's level of competence with that. Now, admittedly, the shop should monitor the instructor and the agency the shop so that there is some kind of quality control.

No matter how you slice it, the instructor is the single consistent interface between the student and the c-card and therefore the key point of responsibility and failure or success.