Grateful Diver wrote:
My initial Fundies class was 2-1/2 days long ... which was really fast-paced and trying to pack way too much into too short of a time frame. When they moved to a four-day class, I think they did their students a huge service by giving them more time to process and perform the skills. Before, if you didn't get it right the first time, you were pretty much guaranteed not to pass.
That fundies class was only 2 days long. We started on friday night, did all day saturday and the instructor flew off halfway through sunday. He doesn't teach for GUE any more, and it was incidents like that one that led to stricter standards on the instructors on how the courses should be run and led to the longer format. I don't believe we were instructed in how to properly shoot a bag, and definitely didn't have any timed ascent drills among other standards issues (which caused issues for us in later courses when we showed up unprepaired).
Another thing that has been introduced is the tech-pass/rec-pass distinction, which makes it easier for a relatively new single tank recreational diver to get a pass out of the course, and then come back later and get a tech upgrade. That has reduced the number of provisionals coming out of the course. Back before the tech/rec distinction all those rec passes would have been provisionals (or they would have been fundies passes at a lower standard leading to tech1 provisionals, which was a problem until the standards for tech passes were better standardized across instructors). Its still fairly difficult and not too common to get a tech pass out of fundies right away.
There's also been a shift towards divers getting more prepared before going into fundies, which is a bit of a double-edged sword since divers can wind up overpracticing the wrong things without good mentorship. When I took my first fundies I had 25 dives and fully expected to get a provisional out of it (at that point I also had zero interest in cave or technical diving at all). Some of the divers had a lot more diving experience (e.g. Bob had around 1,000 dives and had been mentored a bit by a GUE trained diver), but generally for most of the course it was their first exposure to GUE at all.
Anyway, there's been a lot of debugging in the past 8 years, and fundies has evolved a lot as a course, and is almost barely recognizable compared to the course that me and Bob were in (of course, again, that has a lot to do with that instructor, but having QC over instructors get better is part of the debugging that has gone on...)