Full power and minimum altitude loss!

At the university I'm currently at when people come in with their private they have to go through a standardization class to get used to the schools plane and procedures before they can go into instrument. Anyways, I just had a student that had gotten his private less than a month ago that had a habit of reducing the power to idle on power on stalls, and he told me his old instructor taught him that way. I figured he had forgotten the proper recovery technique (even though its only been a couple weeks since he passed his checkride) and he was just doing the old 'everything's my instructor's fault!' game. But maybe there actually are some CFI's out there teaching this?!?