"I never thought I could be doing anything like that!"
Posted By Phil Mucci on 10 October 2007
A quick note for those non-divemasters/instructors out there about the exams. The I.E. exams come in 2 parts, the first of which is broken up into 6 sections, Physics, Skills & Environment, Dive Planning, Equipment and Physiology. There are 12 questions in each section, no more than three can be missed in each. The second part is a standards test, where the candidate must find answers to lengthy questions about PADI standards in various parts of the PADI Instructors Manual, a tome that makes Crime and Punishment look like light reading. Now, keep in mind that not one line of PADI course material comes in Sinhalese, one of the two dominant languages in Sri Lanka. If you're a geek like me, you like saying things like “decreased partial pressure causes supersaturation” and “mediastinal emphysema is a very serious barotrauma”. Perhaps that's why I didn't have many dates in high school. Nevertheless, to one who's fluent in English, such phrases can be solved with Google or god forbid, the dictionary. But for a non-English speaker, with little formal training beyond tourists, the task is utterly Herculean, even if you do know how to order a beer in 20 languages.
So, after the first day of exams, the results came back and they were not good. Steve, the Master Instructor who was assisting Bjorn pulled me aside with a worried look and showed me the exam. Honestly, it looked like a highlighter had exploded on the page: the tally? 49%. “Yikes”, I thought to myself. My results were fine, little brush up here and there, but not much to worry about, and so our journey began. Indika is a close friend of mine and he trusts me implicitly. However, he looked very worried when he saw his test results. I could see everything in his eyes, expectations of his family, his friends, 10 of us Paavimates, a dozen or so donors around the world and then the 100's if not 1000's of Sri Lankan's he was destined to train and help with his work through Paavima.org. The only thing I could do was reassure him to trust me and that we were going to get through this together, one step at a time. I told him one of my favorite sayings, “How do you eat an elephant? The same way you eat everything else, one bite at a time.” This always gets a bit of a laugh since elephants are so respected and revered. BTW, Please don't go making this joke around people or in countries, you are not intimately familiar with.
Bjorn Täckmann doing what he does best, training instructors for the PADI Instructor
You might be asking yourself, how can this happen, when he was a certified Divemaster and Assistant Instructor? The answer is simple. Many of us, as professional divers, perform 'spot learning' when it comes to the Theory material required for the Divemaster course. Most 'normal' divers, never use this knowledge and thus when the exam is over, it's gone faster than the memories of a rough night out drinking (before cell phones had cameras anyways.) That , combined with the fact that much of Indika's exams were done orally, means that very little of the material had sunk in, probably no different than you other divemasters out there reading this article. Regarding the I.E, the overwhelming majority of candidates who fail, do so during the test portion not in the water.
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