I was thinking about this earlier today. I’m talking about the actual driving portion with the instructor with you, not the written nor a simulator.
It’s been many years/decades for me and I remember that the only thing that kept me from a perfect score was when he told me to go parallel park behind the red car over there. The actual parallel parking was a snap but where I went wrong was that the only way to get to where he said to park was to swing wide on a left turn as the spot was close to the intersection. He told me later that I should have circled the block first. Uh huh. :dubious: Of course I then wondered if he would have dinged me for not following directions.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone got a perfect score. At least no one I knew did. So the quasi urban legend that’s been rattling around in my head was whether or not they try to trip you up somehow on purpose in order to avoid granting a perfect score, perhaps just to remind you that everyone is fallible.
Nope. No tricks here. (I got my license in Georgia in 2001). I had friends that got perfect scores. The driving exam was straightforward.
I have heard about stuff you talk about (my uncle has a story about how arizona wouldn’t recognize his Canadian license after his USAF posting went from “somewhere in Canada” to Arizona, which was bullshit, and made him retake the driving test, and then dinged him for avoiding a parked car), but I think most of those incidents are grumpy driving instructors having a bad day.
No, mine didn’t. In fact, they go out of their way to tell you they won’t trick you. My sister’s, however, bought drugs while they were on their road test.
Say what now?!
Yup, they pulled out of the parking spot, didn’t even make it out of the parking lot and he asked her to ‘pull over here’ and he ‘gave some guy some money and the guy gave him a plastic bag and then he rolled up his window and we went’. My sister is quiet and shy and just wanted her license, but in my best ‘easier said than done’ voice I told her I would have turned around, driven right back to the front door of the DMV, hopped out, gone inside, and told the first person I found what happened, and probably made a ton of noise about it. After an incident like that [in the car] I’d be way too nervous to actually pass the test so why not totally blow it for the day at that point.
I’d hope that if he was brazen enough to pull something like that, they’d already have their suspicions about him and they’d believe me and just send me out on the road with someone else and deal with him on their own.
One guy years ago pulled a bunch of crap. Kept setting up situations where doing the official thing wasn’t the best thing to do, safety wise. But the real stupidity is he told me to pretend I was parking on a hill (it was actually flat). I was docked for not turning the wheels the right way. There wasn’t a curb so I turned the wheel to the right. But he thought I should have turned the wheel to the left, which would have been the right thing if there was a curb. Sheesh.
Didn’t take a test there, but when I first went to the DMV here to change plates, I noticed the stop sign leaving the parking lot was very old and rusting; it had no visible “STOP” on it. And this was at a newish place. Obviously put there to test if drivers understood the rule that it was the shape of the sign that mattered, not the word on it.
Sort of. My examiner told me what to do at each step during the exam but near the end I stopped at a T intersection and he didn’t say whether to go left or right. I sat for a bit and decided to go left, thinking that he was testing me to see if I knew how to get back to where we had started. He was testing me, but the test was whether I noticed that there was a “No Left Turn” sign at the intersection. I had done everything perfectly until that point and I was so sad that I think he took pity on me and passed me even though I had made an illegal turn.
Dunno if this qualifies as a “trick”, but after all these years I’m still mildly pissed off at the examiner for failing me on the first road test for having gone through a yellow light at an intersection. The light went yellow when I was right on top of the intersection and I had a fraction of a second to make a choice: hit the brakes and make a hard stop to show what a careful beginning driver I was*, or just continue through the yellow like normal people.
Everything went fine the second road test, and that examiner asked me why I had flunked the first one. When I explained, he just shrugged.
*in real life a hard stop like that on a yellow would’ve stood me a good chance of being rear-ended.
The state of Maryland did (and still does, I think) its driving tests on a closed course behind the DMV building. In Driver’s Ed, we were given a chart showing the layout and told “Here’s the stop sign, here’s the stop light, here’s the 3-point turn, here’s parallel parking…” and unless you were stupid, it was a slam-dunk. I can’t believe that people still failed their driving tests… Heck, I did mine in a big ol’ Ford station wagon, and I parallel parked that puppy like a pro!!
They aren’t allowed to here, and you’re told by your instructor that they aren’t allowed to do that.
I did mishear the examiner on my first test. We were on the motorway and I knew we would need to get off at the next junction or we’d end up in the next town. I thought the examiner said to overtake because the person in front of me was slow (which was true). Then I couldn’t get back in that lane to exit, because it was jammed with lorries. We had to drive to the next town, time was up and he failed me.
He said that he had said not to overtake, exactly for that reason. I still don’t really believe it. :mad:
It think these tricks are only tricks if you aren’t a good driver already.
Saying that I got mine when I was 16 by accident. I was supposed to be taking the exam to get a learner’s permit. Dumb 16 yr me did what I was told by the officials and took a road test. I passed and came home with my real drivers license. My sister was pissed because I go mine before she got hers the next week. She was 18.
I had probably driven all of 3 hours on country roads before the test, so the road test must be really easy.
I don’t think so. I haven’t the faintest clue how I scored–all I cared about is passing. It might have been a perfect score. It might have not. No recollection one way or another–it’s not like there was any incentive to get a perfect score.
I do remember learning that flashing high beams on a sunny day means “police ahead.” That we one we came across on one of our three road lessons (or whatever they were called–when you and another student or two would go out with the instructor and drive around. This was for driver’s ed when I was 15.) One of our instructors would occasionally put his hand quickly over the rearview mirror and ask us what color the car behind us was, just to drill into us to be aware of our surroundings and watch our mirrors. That lesson has actually stuck to me to this day, and I’m a constant mirror scanner (both sides and rear). We weren’t graded for that, though, so far as I know.
And that’s about all I remember of it. I don’t remember the official test itself, but I don’t remember it being difficult or many people (if any) failing even. It’s not something I remember being nervous or worried about.
My wife, who is hypercompetent at way too many things, failed her first drivers’ test. Apparently, this particular examiner NEVER passed a female candidate on the first attempt. This would have been 1969 or so.
On the motorcycle test, there is a test where you start in a box, accelerate thru an arc to a line, then stop quickly in another box.
I borrowed a friend’s bike, and didn’t have much time on it. Anyway, I blew the shift from 1st to 2nd, but concealed the error with smooth throttle control, so it sounded like I hit second and kept speeding up, hit the line and stopped perfectly in the box.
I took my test in my grandfather’s Grenada after training my my high school’s rather smaller Skylark. I managed to do the 3-point turn correctly, made it through the slalom without dinging the doors and was feeling really good about myself all the way up to the end. The cop in the car with me told me to parallel park in front of the doors to the exam building. I pulled in just like I was told and even managed to get within 12" of the curb. Yay, me! Then he told me I failed.
“Why?”
“That’s a red curb,” he said. “You can’t park at a red curb. It’s illegal.”
“You bastard,” I thought. “YOU told me to park here.”
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
I got marked on the wheel turn thing too. And I told the guy as I was doing it that even though there was a low rolled curb it wasn’t high enough to chock the wheel and that it was safer to turn the wheels to the right. Gravity would take the car into the grass instead of down the hill where it could gain speed and harm somebody. Jerk dinged me anyway.
I think it’s slightly different now, though not a whole lot. I still see people practicing parallel parking in the parking lot next to the MVA at all hours.
That said, at the local MVA they seem to get people all the time. There’s a big white stripe on the ground, which in MD is where you stop. However, it’s about 10-15 feet in front of the stop sign, so if one doesn’t stop twice in about 15 feet you fail right away.
No tricks or traps but one hell of a misunderstanding during my very first road test.
She told me to turn right but I though she said “left”. This was quickly cleared up but then she told me to go straight, which I took literally and entered a one-way street the wrong way! So she told me to take the next right, which I gladly did, and ended up on a winding road that I took a little too fast.
I still passed. Poor little petite lady probably was afraid to test me a second time.
