Quote: (Originally Posted by jradomski)
Ulimately its the instructor's name going on the card.. The only way the instructor can know if the student meets the requirements for the certification is to have them do all the skills..
I personally feel you cant practice skills too much.. I routinely practice them myself to stay sharp.
I think this is where we have a divergence of opinion between instructors and students/consumers.
As a consumer, I wish to pay for the instructor to give me the benefit of all the knowledge they have on a particular unit - to be honest I'm completely indifferent as to whether the instructor thinks that after a handful of dives on a new unit that I am in anyway competant on it. That's not the point of the training from my perspective - I want to learn all I can, not satisfy someone that I can manage to perform some task to a minimum acceptable standard once.
Without intending offence, I actually beleive it is somewhat arrogant of any instructor to think that they can get a student to a satisfactory level of competance in a handful of dives. To focus on meeting performance standards is somewhat meaningless when the standards must, by necessity, be quite low.
A slightly tongue in cheek question; If, as an instructor, you beleive that if a student is competant once they have passed your course, why make people wait to do trimix (etc.). If they are competant (and they must be, as you have passed them
) then why not roll straight into advanced trimix after initial training, or a crossover?
For me, a course is an opportunity for me to learn from someone with good experience. From my perspective, a certification card is the
instructor certifying that they have given
me all the information they have relevant to the course being undertaken. I can be satisfied that I have the basis to go away and actually become competant at whatever it is I'm doing.
Perhaps it should be the consumer who signs off the engagement as complete, much like it is in most other fields where a consultant is enguaged to impart expert knowledge?
Mike