Since each and every student and instructor is a unique being with a unique history of experience bases, we each arrive on a wilderness program with unique mental abilities. We not only have a unique capacity to make judgments, we have a unique capacity to learn to make judgments about new things. We need to assume that new students are novices in the world of outdoor judgment until they prove otherwise. This implies that they have enough of an experience base to make a comparative evaluation in our setting. That's reasonable, but it isn't asking for much.
Some students seem to have more common sense than others.
But it is really judgment we are trying to develop in our students. This judgment includes both specific technical skills areas, and people skills . To learn this judgment students need to learn how to make decisions, and they need practice in the setting they are in. Students also need to not learn dogma . When we teach dogmatically, we are providing simple rules that only work in identical situations.