Should training classes be more difficult to pass?

[drm]

I routinely see new divers who have trouble setting up their gear, entering and exiting the water, and maintaining decent buoyancy control. Is that because these individuals were not trained appropriately or where passed without really performing tasks correctly and adequately? Or, are training classes just too easy and designed for anyone to pass no matter how they perform? Is passing, failing, and level of difficulty up to individual instructors or an agency thing?

Dave
www.divingindepth.com

[timle]

The training should be up to agency standards but there is no one there monitoring every single class that occurs to make sure the instructor is following all standards. That is why choice of instructor is very important. I feel my instructor was very good - he taught us what we needed to know and I have felt very confident in my dives since my cert.

PADI does send out surveys about the classes to see if the instructors taught what they were supposed to teach and they will suspend an instructors license if they get bad evals.

[PerroneFord]

Apparently it's up to the individial instructor. My buoyancy control was pretty poor in class, though better now. Trim was never mentioned. And I just wasn't comfortable enough in the water. But this was 11 years ago. My friend just finished his SSI OW this summer, but had some trouble in gear setup, and with some other things.

It's really hard to get a lot of things right, in the short time alloted for classes.

[Wayward Son]

I don't think they need to be more difficult. I do think they need to be longer, have more pool sessions, in order to have redunant work on the skills.

[MikeFerrara]

Training doesn't need to be hard. It needs to be thorough. being thourough makes it easier rather than harder.

Many important skills are generally either not taught at all or taught in such a way that they will need to be relearned before they are of any real use to the diver.

An example...clearing a mask while kneeling. I suppose it doesn't do any lasting harm to be on the bottom the first time or two that you try it but eventually you need to learn to do it midwater while you maintain buddy awareness and contact in preperation for that 50 ft wall diver you're going to do with the bottom several hundred feet below you. You need to learn to manage whatever tasks you'll have to do or whatever problems you might need to solve like sharing air, managing a free flow or just scrathing your nose, midwater and with control in preperation for the same dive.

So, is training too easy? No. Sometimes they just end it before they get to anything that you could really call diving.

[Walter]

Training doesn't need to be hard. It needs to be thorough. being thourough makes it easier rather than harder.

Many important skills are generally either not taught at all or taught in such a way that they will need to be relearned before they are of any real use to the diver.

An example...clearing a mask while kneeling. I suppose it doesn't do any lasting harm to be on the bottom the first time or two that you try it but eventually you need to learn to do it midwater while you maintain buddy awareness and contact in preperation for that 50 ft wall diver you're going to do with the bottom several hundred feet below you. You need to learn to manage whatever tasks you'll have to do or whatever problems you might need to solve like sharing air, managing a free flow or just scrathing your nose, midwater and with control in preperation for the same dive.

So, is training too easy? No. Sometimes they just end it before they get to anything that you could really call diving.

Excellent points, especially:

Training doesn't need to be hard. It needs to be thorough. being thourough makes it easier rather than harder.

[MikeFerrara]

The training should be up to agency standards but there is no one there monitoring every single class that occurs to make sure the instructor is following all standards. That is why choice of instructor is very important. I feel my instructor was very good - he taught us what we needed to know and I have felt very confident in my dives since my cert.

PADI does send out surveys about the classes to see if the instructors taught what they were supposed to teach and they will suspend an instructors license if they get bad evals.

Well the surveys are looking for standards violations. Let me throw something else out for you. You can meet PADI standards for OW by crawling around on your knees through the tours of each of the 4 required dives, while following the pack and having absolutely no idea what's going on with your buddy, if you even have one. Of course on dive 4 you have to get neutral sometime during the dive to satisfy what used to be a requirement that you hover for a minute and you have to do your fin pivots on dive 3. Other than that you don't have to get off the bottom to satisfy standards. For that matter there might not even be a tour because a dive needs to be 20 minutes and if you spend 20 minutes on your knees (doing skills ha ha ha) then you probably won't get much of a tour.

So, golly, why would any instructor, even one who's in a real hurry ever need to violate standards...the standards don't ask for anything.

[TheRedHead]

An example...clearing a mask while kneeling. I suppose it doesn't do any lasting harm to be on the bottom the first time or two that you try it but eventually you need to learn to do it midwater

Don't tell me there are divers who must kneel on the bottom to clear their mask!? The first time I cleared my mask outside of class, going to the bottom to kneel never occurred to me.

[*Floater*]

Should training classes be more difficult to pass?

No because if someone wants to dive it's their own business. I do think scuba classes should do a better job of informing students about the potential dangers associated with scuba diving, but after that and basic training, it's up to each person to decide whether they are comfortable enough to venture into the water.

If you want more training then you can always purchase it.

Now I realize many of you may be saying 'hey, wait a minute, undemanding training leads to more accidents and thus I have to pay more for my dive insurance', and I think that's a fair point, but I personally think dive insurance prices are pretty reasonable as is, so I don't see this as a huge problem. Also if scuba classes were more rigorous, then they would probably cost more too, so you might end up paying more anyway.

[TSandM]

I routinely see new divers who have trouble setting up their gear, entering and exiting the water,

Okay. You're hitting me where it hurts, now.

I'll be the first one to say that my skills at the end of OW were pretty scary. But no amount of "training" or education is going to help me keep my balance on slippery rocks with 70 pounds on my back!