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There has to be a good reason to flunk the test and if you flunk then you're not ready to drive on public streets. Teens also have the highest accident rates.
OP just imagine what would happen to her if she was to pass the test doing what she failed to do, and had a coke in her lap and a cell phone to her ear with 3 screaming friends in the car.
This is kind of on the subject. How many here have taught their kids to drive? I tried it with my first and it tested every nerve in my body. I took her out about a half dozen times and I was a wreck. I set up cones in front of my home and had her practicing parallel parking. My neighbor (who is about 10 years older than me) saw my frustration and gave me some of the best advice I ever got. He said, driving lessons will keep you sane. I signed her up and she did great. My next two kids went to driving school as well. In my opinion it was money well spent.
They do driver's education in school in NC. No costs involved.
They do driver's education in school in NC. No costs involved.
What is taught in NC schools is barely enough to pass the test. Passing the test should give someone the right to do nothing more than drive around an empty parking lot. A couple hours of drive time isn't enough to unleash a teen with two tons of lethal machine on the roads. Regardless of excuses given, anyone who can't pass our minimal testing shouldn't be allowed to drive. Given the seriousness of the driving responsibility I think the passing score should be much higher than 75%.
Teens who have no experience shouldn't be making any assumptions about where they may be getting passed on the road, or anything else. As for leaving it to the schools, I wouldn't let my kids on the road unless I was sure they were as ready as they could be.
It's completely normal to flunk driver's road tests...some fail even a few times...nerves are always a factor.
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Normal? I don't know anyone that failed their Driver's test.
If you know how to drive it becomes second nature and the fact a examiner is with you should be meaningless.
When I was 16 Driver's Education was required by law or you couldn't get a Driver's License until you were 18(I am not from NC and this was a very long time ago).
Normal? I don't know anyone that failed their Driver's test.
If you know how to drive it becomes second nature and the fact a examiner is with you should be meaningless.
When I was 16 Driver's Education was required by law or you couldn't get a Driver's License until you were 18(I am not from NC and this was a very long time ago).
I have grown kids...when they were getting their licenses...many friends and aquaintances flunked the first test at least. A DMV employee will verify that it is pretty normal.
Thanks for the advice all and maybe i'm over reacting a bit but after a 2 hour a week driving school for the last 6 months and her and i going out twice a week for at least an hour for the last year the kid is a competant driver and i'm comfortable with her driving skills and so is the driving school.
To have her flunk over such trivialities and more to do with the testers opinion than her actual driving ability is very frustrating. and at $75 everytime you try it can become expensive.
When my son took the test in September, the tester lady told us that 80% of the applicants fail the test the first time. (Son was furious because he got two points off, he worked really hard and expected to be perfect, you can get something like 18 off and pass).
My daughter who avoids driving like the plague, is taking the test today (She is a year older than her brother). I have already discussed with her a plan for further practice to work on the things that cause her to fail. I will be amazed if she passes. She is not a terrible driver, just overly cautious and not sufficiently experienced. IMO. Sure she will be fine driving the 2 miles to work or to school on 35 MPH roads with no traffic if she manages to pass, but she will not be driving out in the "real world" outside of our little island for some time. At least not alone. She needs another 200 hours or so practice I think.
Daughter actually does not seem to want to get her license, but we are tired of picking her up from work late at night. I thikn she wants to pass, but I am not sure, she is just going and taking the test without practicing the things that she never does (like parallel parking).
The test is pretty hard. I might have problems with the tighter parking and driving around backwards.
By the way, the OP probably was present during his daughters test. At least where we went, parents are required to ride along if they are under 18.
Thanks for the advice all and maybe i'm over reacting a bit but after a 2 hour a week driving school for the last 6 months and her and i going out twice a week for at least an hour for the last year the kid is a competent driver and i'm comfortable with her driving skills.
To have her flunk over such trivialities and more to do with the testers opinion than her actual driving ability is very frustrating. and at $75 every time you try it can become expensive.
Here i think they are supposed to drive for four or more months on a permit before taking the test. I am not sure that it is required.. Usually, they just set it up so that most kids finish the school a year before their 16th birthday. OUr drivers ed is also in two parts. They take part one at 14.5 years and Part 2 after the parents certify that they have practices a certain amount of time under specific condi8tions (so many hours night driving, so many hours on the freeway, etc).
IMO a hundred hours of driving is not enough practice. My son had well over a thousand hours driving before he took the test. My daughter has maybe 150 hours. That is why I expect it likely that she will fail. You need a lot of time. Not every conceivable situation will come up every time you drive. Some come up only very rarely. The driving routes are designed to test situations that many drivers typically have trouble with.
The driving instructor lady indirectly admitted to us that sometimes, there are kids who clearly are not ready to drive and she finds a way to fail them even if she does not catch any blatant errors. If they clench the wheel with all their might, turn pale, breathe heavy and are clearly panicked just pulling out of the parking lot, they probably are not ready, even if they manage to complete all of the necessary maneuvers. Remember, they see hundreds of drivers. They have a pretty good feel for when someone is not really ready to drive on their own.
I would not be a good tester. I would have failed all of my kids. I would aslo probably have failed my wife and if i tested myself, I would probably fail me. Everyone makes too many mistakes. I have more than 30 years experience and some years I drive more than 40,000 miles. I can drive really well when I am fully awake, alert, and focused only on driving well. However at other times, if I am tired, distracted at all, etcetera, I make various mistakes. Some minor, some bad mistakes (like running a stop sign or failing to signal before changing lanes. Each error is pretty rare, but there are so many errors to make. . . . I have never seen one person ever drive without making a mistake. I remember driving with one friend who claimed they never make mistakes, they are always focussed. I asked about a stop sign they ran through and he said no way. We had to drive back and point it out before he would believe he ran a stop sign. HE siad "That is new, it was nto there before" FAIL!
Driving a car is like speaking a foreign language. No matter how perfectly you can conjugate the verbs and explain the ablative absolutes, you can't speak the language until you spend a lot of time speaking the language to people who understand and speak it to you in real time.
You simply can't test for it. Sneak a drivers examiner into the back seat of random cars, and 99% of all experienced and competent drivers would fail. It's just a moronic exercise invented by Big Brother. Drivers licenses probably shouldn't even be required. Everybody learns how to drive fairly quickly once they get behind the wheel and have somebody show them how to do it, and then it continues to be a learning curve for the rest of their life.
If I still drove with the level of competency I had when I passed my first test, I'd have had hundreds of accidents and killed dozens of people by now. But I was a "licensed driver" which had some bizarro world significance unrelated to how competent I was to drive. And then, after five years, if you don't go in and pay the fee and have your picture taken again, you are suddenly deemed unfit to drive and a menace to society.
A certain segment of the population will never become safe drivers, ever, they just won't, they can't, it's not part of their constitutional makeup. But they go in and get 75% of the true-false questions right and try to remember during the test to check the blind spots, and eventually get an examiner who passes everybody, and they are then presumed for life to be better drivers than Jambo's daughter. It's just pageantry.
They won't let you drive until you memorize the fact that the stopping distance of a car going X miles and hour is 185 feet. I've always wanted to say to an examiner, Come over here to the window and point to something out there that is 185 feet away, in order to prove to me that that fact has any more real world relevance than the fact that the surface temperature of one of Jupiter's moons is 185 degrees kelvin.
Last edited by jtur88; 02-04-2012 at 11:14 AM..
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