This old post is attracting a lot of hits, lately. It contains a valid point that is valid all the time – not just in the case I described – so I’ve polished it a little.
I had a pupil fail her test on the parallel park (back in 2011). She only got five faults in total.
Now, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I have never had a pupil fail the test for a reason that I didn’t agree with, or which wasn’t valid. This particular situation is no different – not technically, anyway. My pupil didn’t complete the parallel park properly and finished partly on the pavement, and the examiner is not at fault for failing her.
However… the examiner had chosen a location where the driveways didn’t have a raised kerb (it was one of those you can drive a car over). At the time they were doing it, the heavens opened and there was a torrential downpour. I can vouch for it, because in the waiting room back at Chalfont Drive (this was 2011, remember) I was watching it out of the window, thinking “wow!” after it went dark like someone had just turned out the lights.
My pupil was quite upset at failing, as they usually are. In this case, though, I had a lot of sympathy, because she said that she couldn’t see the kerb and had finished perfectly straight otherwise. Apparently, she asked if they could go somewhere else, but the examiner had asked her to continue.
The pavement is the pavement, and you can’t drive or stop on it, and especially not in reverse and on your test. But it does make you wonder why some common sense couldn’t have been exercised by the examiner, and the manoeuvre repeated or resumed after the rain had stopped – perhaps in a new location with a clearly defined kerb. Other examiners sometimes allow ordinarily serious faults to pass because the drive was otherwise excellent (I have no argument against that), so when you hear of things like this you .
No matter how long you’ve been driving, in order to parallel park properly you have to be able to see the kerb! If you can’t see it, you can only guess where you are, which is dangerous. Furthermore, if you can’t “feel” the kerb (i.e. detect if the wheels nudge it) you can’t react to it and correct it. My pupil had no chance – there was rain on the windows, rain on the mirror, rain on the road, no visible kerb line, and no physical kerb to feel with the wheels.
Expecting a learner to do a parallel park as if they were wearing a blindfold in such poor conditions – conditions that 99% of all other candidates don’t experience – is wholly unreasonable. It’s no wonder stories about “quotas” start circulating when an examiner basically forces someone into a fail like this.
I repeat, this article refers to a test in 2011. I can’t even remember who the examiner was, or if he (it was a “he”) is still working.