I failed because I was driving just a bit too fast - my first test was mostly in a residential neighborhood with a speed limit of 20 or something. The second time, I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign (hard to see until I was right at it) but still passed.
Broadly, parallel parking.
Specifically … I wish I knew, so maybe I can pass next time.
I failed my first time because I tried to merge in traffic when the person asked me to merge, and got stuck in between two lanes, a critical error. Otherwise she said I did an excellent job and she felt genuinely bad about having to fail me.
The next time I only made one mistake, but the person doing my test was abrupt and kind of rude. I didn’t care though! I had passed!
I failed the first time for two reasons:
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The closed course included a stretch of pavement with no center line. Having done a very great deal of my learners permit driving on dirt roads, I was accustomed to drive down the middle unless there was oncoming traffic. (The tester said this was a really common error at this facility. At the time, this county had the most miles of unpaved roads in the state.)
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I took the test in my mom’s old 1975 Cadillac Sedan Deville - one of the largest and widest production models to ever roll off the assembly line in Detroit. To this day, I have no idea how I got it into the space for parallel parking. I knocked down two cones getting it back out. (Later, we measured the space and the car. The car was only 14 inches shorter than the space.)
I went back a week later and passed with 100% driving my mom’s new LTD Limited.
My first time, it was the dead of winter, maybe 15 F. My instructor hopped in the car and told me to start it. I had my seat belt on and asked him to put his on too. He just kept telling me to turn the car on. Long story short, he failed me instantly for “cutting off” some person that was half a mile away in the mall parking lot. He was pissed that I hadn’t started the heat quickly enough.
My second attempt was one county north of my first. People said that unless you got the woman that passed the guy who got 4 people killed after she passed him, you’d be fine. We all know who I got.
Everything went well, including a jaunt through a residential street. It wasn’t untill the end that she said I went left of center, on that residential street. I was avoiding parked cars and children only. There was no center line at all, and I would drive the same way today as I did then even with a driving instructor today.
That said, I drove like a jackass after I git my license, teen boys tend to do that. Hence the rules I guess.
I passed my German written and practical exams (which are, as has been pointed out, really expensive and kinda hard to pass) on the first try. When I spent some time in San Diego, I wanted to get a Californian license pretty much just for kicks, so I applied and took the written test (passed) and the practical. We were driving around in a little residential area with literally no cars on the road, mostly not even any parked ones. The instructor had me parallel park and when we were about to get back onto main traffic, he wanted me to turn left. I was coming up on the pedestrian crossing just before the intersection, which had a solid white line all across the street. They don’t look like that in Germany. I decided it was a stop line for turning on the main road, and since it was across the whole street I figured it must have been a one way. So to make the left turn, I got on the left side of the street (after I hadn’t encountered any moving car for two minutes) and was failed for a lane violation. :smack:
When I came back a couple of weeks later they wouldn’t let me take the test because my tourist visa was good for less than six weeks and the license wouldn’t be good for one day more (which I didn’t know). So I didn’t get the Californian license and happily drove off the lot with my valid German one.
I forgot to take off the handbrake. 
smack:
When I told this story to a friend of mine, to make me feel better she told me about her brother’s driving test. He failed because he reversed out of his space in the driving centre carpark and crashed straight into another car.
I live in South Africa, which has a notoriously difficult driver’s test. I failed twice before passing the third time, which is apparently the average here.
The first time, I was driving along a road which had two lanes in one direction, and I was in the right lane, which (it turns out) became a right-turn-only lane at the next intersection. Since I was supposed to go straight I ended up having to cut in to the left lane at the last minute, and I failed for “causing an obstruction to traffic” or something like that. Fair enough, I suppose, I wasn’t really ready to drive at that point anyway.
The second time, I pulled up at a stop sign and the tester said I hadn’t stopped fully behind the stop line. I disagreed, so we both got out of the car to look. We found that the road surface right there had been lifted to lay cables, so there was no stop line, and he grudgingly admitted that I couldn’t stop behind a nonexistent line. But by this point I was quite flustered, so when I pulled off I rolled back a little (it was on a slope) so I failed for that.
Third time round, I was perfect, apparently.
I passed my first time (barely), as did both of my children. My wife, on the other hand, an extreme perfectionist who is hyper-competent at almost everything (she can’t carry a tune in a bucket, though), failed her first time.
It turned out that the examiner had a policy to always fail female students the first time. This wasn’t the Fifties, either - it was 1971. Amazing.