Bash, always check $PWD as part of path?

Background: One of my colleagues who doesn't come from a Linux background asked me about using ./ before some commands and not others, so I explained to him how PATH works and how binaries are chosen to be run. His response was that it was dumb and he just wanted to not need to type ./ before commands. Question: Is there a way to easily modify the behavior of the shell such that $PWD is always the first item on PATH?