Morning,
mefoster wrote:Russ,
As an examiner, to what would you attribute the rather high failure rate? Would you say that candidates are generally "ready for test" when they turn up and subsequently fail through silly mistakes or test nerves or are they simply not up to standard? What I am getting at is, how would you rate the overall preparedness of the average test candidate?
It's very difficult to answer these questions, but I'll make a few suggestions.
The issue of test nerves has already been mentioned, and it is undoubtedly a major
problem for many candidates. I think that a lot of this stems from stories that people
hear from friends and family. Have you noticed how many people, when they recall their
test(s), have a horror story to tell. In reality, most driving tests are boringly ordinary.
Looking back, it is completely clear that some instructors produce far better candidates
than others, on the whole. Even the best instructors would occasionally produce a poor
candidate, and these were probably examples of nerves.
It would be very informative to find out exactly how the more successful instructors
operated. It was not, as far as I can work out, simply a matter of more lessons. There
were a number of instructors who were known to sell very high numbers of lessons, but
their candidates were never much good.
What is not clear to the average ADI is the huge gulf in the quality of lessons offered
by instructors. Having carried out ADI check tests for some years, it was my pleasure to
watch many lessons of a very high quality, but, unfortunately, they were vastly outnumbered
by poor quality work.
It was my practice, when conducting a check test, to note down my first impressions of the
pupil's driving after only a couple of minutes. Often, to use examiners' jargon, this would be,
for example,
mirror direction, or
junction speed plus. It was remarkable how often
these first impressions reflected the pupil's ability throughout the lesson. The main point I
would like to make is that these obvious faults were often not addressed by the ADI until well into
the lesson, and were sometimes never addressed at all. I am not talking here of trivial faults,
but of major issues which merited immediate attention.
It is not, therefore, especially surprising that many candidates attended for test without having
established the fundamentals of good driving.
Regards,
Russ