The move comes after the agency was told there was no evidence to back up the claim. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now, it’s very important to understand what this is actually saying. Unfortunately, such understanding appears to be totally beyond many ADIs.<\/p>\n What is is<\/em> saying is that after looking at 4,000 insurance claims there is no evidence to substantiate the claim that those doing Pass Plus are less likely to have accidents.<\/p>\n It’s also amusing that although it has taken 4 years to obtain the data and draw this conclusion, Professor Frank McKenna, a psychologist (so, not quite a real scientist) on the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport (so, not an unbiased employee, either),\u00a0makes this counter statement:<\/p>\n “The worst thing you can do with a young driver is increase their confidence without increasing their competence,” he said. <\/p>\n “If there’s no increase in competence you potentially run the risk of increasing the chance of accidents.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Let me emphasis this again: it took 4 years<\/strong> to get enough data (and it’s debatable that it is<\/em> enough) to conclude that\u00a0Pass Plus has a limited effect, yet a pseudo-scientist in the employ of the government\u00a0can come out with something like that in a few seconds<\/strong>… and get published as an authority! I suspect this is partly yet another LibCon attempt to smear the previous government.<\/p>\n McKenna is expressing an opinion – opinion based on political leaning\/employment\u00a0– and not a fact.<\/p>\n It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they can’t prove whether or not Pass Plus decreases accidents. Most of the time, drawing a neat conclusion even from a single accident is difficult, so adding a heap of these together is hardly going to give a definitive answer to the Meaning Of Life.<\/p>\n Pass Plus is still a useful course. Any post-test training of this kind is – it HAS<\/em><\/strong> to be. However, it if there is no insurance benefit and comedians like McKenna appear to suggest incorrectly that it’s useless,\u00a0it’s hard to see what justification people will have for taking it.<\/p>\n If McKenna can make statements of the obvious and use them out of context, the rest of us can make them and use them IN<\/em><\/strong> context…<\/p>\n McKenna says it is dangerous to increase someone’s confidence without increasing their competence. That’s all he says, so you have to fill in the rest yourself (e.g. by implication, therefore, “Pass Plus is a dangerous course that is more likely to kill young drivers than to save them”).<\/p>\n I say that ANY<\/em><\/strong> post-test training is beneficial and as long as it is delivered correctly it’s effects will be beneficial. ANY<\/em><\/strong> negative effects, such as driving dangerously, are entirely the responsibility and decision\u00a0of the driver. He or she can drive in a dangerous manner before<\/em> taking a course, and most do. If a course doesn’t say “drive fast”, you cannot blame the course for things if people do.<\/p>\n At the very least, not until you have years and years of statistical data instead of just a political axe to grind. Oh, and perhaps a proper scientific qualification if you’re going to dabble in complicated topics.<\/p>\n Courses provide additional tools and knowledge… they do not change attitudes. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I saw this story on Sky News today. Apparently, the DSA has altered its website wording and no longer claims that doing the Pass Plus course reduces your chances of having an accident. The move comes after the agency was told there was no evidence to back up the claim. Now, it’s very important to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![\"Pass](\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/passplus.gif\" "\\"Pass")
It’s worth pointing out that even\u00a0if those 4,000 claims are all for different people and different accidents (this isn’t stated, neither is the type of accident, cause, blame, etc.), it represents just 1% of the total number of people who have taken the Pass Plus course<\/strong>. Something is statistically very fishy in there. If Sky (and Admiral)\u00a0can make such a sweeping assessment about such a complex subject based on such a tiny sample, it would appear highly likely that the actual analysis was flawed through not taking into account accident type, and so on.<\/p>\n\n