New DMV Test Sets Obstacle Course for Drivers

Robert Carr, who had failed once before, stood at the counter and watched a clerk check off 17 wrong answers out of 36 questions. He shuffled away from the DMV’s new written driver’s test like a man just pulled from a car wreck.

“It was hard,” he muttered as he left the Bellflower branch office, his test form a mess of red ink.

There are no yellow warning signs, but already the word is out on the street: Caution, Treacherous Exam Ahead. The agency that brought you smog tests and registration fees has made it tougher than ever to qualify for a California driver’s license.

More than half of drivers are now failing the written test. For people applying to drive for the first time, the failure rate is 77%.

Lester Showalter, 86, has racked up nearly 70 years of collision-free California driving, covering close to a million miles. But that was not enough to prepare him for some of the DMV’s new hypothetical questions--which, to Showalter, seemed like so much hairsplitting.

“I thought I got 100% . . . thought I did real good,” Showalter said, staring at his answer form, marked up with corrections. “Evidently not.”

The lesson, said Departmentof Motor Vehicles spokesman Bill Branch, is that you’ve got to prepare.

“There’s a tendency to think, when people get to be 40 years old, when they think they’re a safe driver, they should have no trouble. They shouldn’t have to study. Wrong,” Branch said. “They don’t realize how much they forget.”

Branch said the new test tries to allow for the fact that most drivers operate “by feel” rather than by rules. Many of the old questions about time and distance--when to start signaling a turn, for example--have been removed or reworded. The test now places a greater emphasis on general knowledge and safety.

“We’ve come to the realization that most people don’t drive with a stopwatch, and most people don’t drive with a tape measure,” Branch said. “We’ve tried to eliminate some of the rote-memory types of questions . . . and make sure someone driving next to you on a rain-slicked highway at night knows the basic rules of the road.”

Then why so many failures?

One reason is many of the questions are new, according to Branch. Every time the DMV changes the written test, Branch said, failure rates go up. But no overhaul of the test has ever been this dramatic.

In years past, said Branch, the written test came in five versions drawn from a pool of 120 questions. This new incarnation comes in 10 versions drawn from a pool of 340 questions. Lest that still allow for some predictability, the DMV now shuffles the questions every three months, resulting in a new raft of combinations.

Common sense remains elemental to many questions, but some drivers--many drivers--have difficulty translating their instinctive actions on the highway to fill-in-the-blank answers. In some cases, language barriers also interfere.

Nino DeJesus, 21, whose first language is Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, passed on his third try. He was dinged for not knowing when to flash his brake lights or emergency lights while driving. He said they should be turned on when driving much much slower than other traffic. The correct answer: When it’s necessary to warn other drivers of an accident ahead.

“I’m just glad I passed,” DeJesus said.

One of Carr’s many wrong answers involved railroad tracks--specifically, when to cross. He answered: When the train is completely out of sight. The correct response: “Only when you can see clearly in both directions.”

“It kind of makes sense,” he said glumly.

Showalter erred when he was placed, hypothetically, on a freeway with a big truck in the center lane. To properly pass, he wrote, you should overtake the truck slowly, on the left.

Wrong. Quickly on the left is the DMV’s desired response.

“To me that’s wrong,” Showalter said. “You go--you go ahead and go--and you take it easy.”

Despite some outcry over the new exam, the test has won praise from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said DMV spokesman Branch. Drivers should be heartened by the fact that every correct answer is contained in the driver handbooks available online or free at every DMV office.

“If you read that manual, you will have an excellent chance of passing,” Branch said. “Conversely, if you don’t read it . . . you will have a difficult time, no matter how intelligent you are, how well-educated you are or how good a driver you are. . . . Most of us haven’t the vaguest notion of what new laws are passed, for example.”

That may explain why the least experienced drivers--teenagers who are applying for their learner’s permits--do best on the new written test. They fail only 45% of the time. (Road tests are much easier, statistically, than the written exam; only 34% of all drivers fail the behind-the-wheel test.)

Because of automatic renewals, adults with good driving records can go many years without having to bother with the written test. Unfortunately, when they do, some resort to cheating. There have been isolated arrests outside DMV offices for selling test answers, according to Branch. Some scofflaws have even resorted to printing answers on pencils that applicants use to mark their test forms.

It is hoped the new test will put an end to that practice.

“It’s hard,” said Branch, “to print 340 answers on a pencil.”