A reader sent me a link to this story in Autoblog.It deals with the issue of mentally unstable people (that’s my spin on the matter, not Autoblog’s) who probably shouldn’
t be allowed to breed, let alone drive a car.
The story reports that last year 209 examiners were verbally assaulted, and five were physically assaulted, by people who were allegedly ready to take their driving tests.
It’s actually yet another one of those “freedom of information” (FOI) requests – this time by Autoglass, though Heaven knows why they should be asking about this. Coincidentally, a pupil this afternoon told me about an article on MSN about people being injured on their tests. It appears to be from the same source, just a different angle.
The article goes on to say that out of 1.5 million driving tests taken in 2010, 339 people (examiners or test candidates) were injured – 147 of which were classed as “serious”.
The article doesn’t mention the simple statistic that this corresponds to 0.023% of candidates. LIkewise, the examiner abuse figure clocks in at 0.015% of examiners. I don’t think we should be assuming this happens all the time. Of course, it isn’t right, but it just isn’t as widespread as the media (and in this case, Autoglass) would have us believe.
The article also seems impressed that out of those 1.5 million tests, more than 1 million “dangerous” faults were committed. It’s a shame they didn’t bother to clarify what this actually means. I suspect that a “dangerous” fault is their take, and is one which results in a fail (so, includes “serious”) – hence, about two thirds of tests are failed, which approximates to what most ADIs know as the national pass rate. They also don’t specify how many people were on repeat tests (the DSA doesn’t log that data, I believe).