DMV Takes Steps to Keep Test Takers Honest

Cheating the Internal Revenue Service, a spouse or your employer can land you in hot water fast, but a lot of Californians have figured out that cheating on the driver’s license exams administered by the Department of Motor Vehicles is a risk-free game.

DMV officials acknowledge that cheating has become a serious problem worth doing something about, and they have taken steps this year to keep test takers honest.

How widespread has cheating become? One sign can be found in the various ethnic community Yellow Pages, many of which publish license exams and answers. This year’s edition of the Chinese Yellow Pages directory includes such a test, though its authenticity is not clear. DMV officials said they were unaware of it.

Motorists apparently have plenty of motivation to cheat, since 64% of those who take the tests in English for the first time flunk, according to a DMV study last year. The failure rate is even worse in other languages. Given the study’s findings, the agency has changed its exams so that more people can pass--arguably dumbing them down but also eliminating silly trick questions.

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But people still cheat, and Californians have come up with all kinds of ways to master the intellectual challenge of questions about highway signs and parking and traffic laws.

“If you take the test often enough, you can eventually acquire all of the forms,” Ray Peck, research chief at the DMV, said in an interview earlier this year. “Then there are people who memorize the answer sequence on the tests. Or people come with sequences written on their fingers.”

California is the nation’s leader in technology, though maybe not in smart drivers. There isn’t much downside to cheating, at least for cheaters.

“There isn’t any law against it that I know of,” Peck said. “We’ve bandied about making it illegal.”

Even if it were illegal, does anybody really think that law enforcement should haul somebody to jail for writing answers on his or her sleeves? Although many experts doubt that written tests effectively weed out bad drivers, a rudimentary knowledge of traffic rules is important to highway safety.

So the agency is trying to make it more difficult to cheat.

“One of the things we are doing to reduce cheating is going to a format where we are randomizing the sequence of the tests and content of the forms, changing every four months,” Peck said.

The DMV also introduced more versions of its exams earlier this year, doubling the number to 10 in English and changing them four times a year. That makes it more difficult for people to memorize the questions off the test forms, which are handed back to motorists after they finish.

But adding versions is costly, and in California the task is complicated by the large pool of motorists who are not fluent in English. (Of course, you don’t have to speak English to get a driver’s license.)

The DMV administers its tests in 34 languages, including Laotian, Hebrew, Tongan and Assyrian. The agency has only one test for some languages, which is understandable--how many versions in Tongan can it afford to create? It contracts out the job of translating the exams in obscure languages.

So what happens when the DMV discovers somebody cheating at one of its offices? A spokesman said the agency fails the cheaters.

Now that’s reassuring, isn’t it?

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Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Please do not telephone. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.