Most advice about the driving test is written by people who have taken one. This is written from the other seat: our founder, Asif, worked as a DVSA driving examiner before starting 1Driving, and marked a great many of these.
The single most useful thing to understand is that the examiner is not looking for a perfect drive. They are looking for a safe one. Those are different standards, and confusing them is what makes people nervous about things that do not matter.
Minors, serious and dangerous
There are three kinds of mark, and the difference between them is consequence, not neatness.
- A driving fault — a “minor”. Something that was not ideal but put nobody at risk. You can collect up to 15 of these and still pass.
- A serious fault. Something that was potentially dangerous, or the same minor repeated so often it becomes a pattern. One of these ends the test in a fail.
- A dangerous fault. Actual danger to you, the examiner, the public or property. Also an immediate fail.
That middle category catches people out. Four instances of the same habit — not checking a blind spot, say — stops being four minors and becomes one serious fault, because it is no longer a lapse, it is how you drive.
The three that cause most avoidable fails
1. Observation that is performed rather than done
Examiners can tell the difference between a driver checking a mirror and a driver moving their head at a mirror. The tell is whether anything changes as a result. If you look and then pull out regardless of what was there, the look did not happen in any way that counts.
This is the most common serious fault we see, and it is the easiest to fix, because it is a habit rather than a skill.
2. Hesitancy at junctions
Being too cautious is marked. Sitting at a junction while four usable gaps go past is not safe driving — it creates pressure behind you and it means you are not reading the road, you are waiting for certainty that will not come.
Around here it shows up most at the busier junctions on Ealing Road and on the North Circular slip roads, where the gaps are real but they need to be taken decisively.
3. Lane discipline and positioning
Particularly on multi-lane roundabouts and the approaches to them. Drifting between lanes, cutting a lane on exit, or sitting in the wrong one until the last moment are all marked, and on a busy route they get marked more than once — which is how a positioning habit turns into a serious fault.
What the examiner is not doing
Some reassurance, because nerves attach themselves to the wrong things:
- They are not trying to catch you out. The routes are not designed to trap anybody.
- They are not marking you down for stalling once, recovering calmly and carrying on.
- They are not silently judging your gear changes. Being slightly clunky is not a fault if the car is under control.
- They have no quota. There is no number of passes they are allowed to give that day.
The one thing worth practising
If you do nothing else with this article: practise driving as though somebody is going to ask you afterwards why you did each thing. Why that gear, that position, that gap. Drivers who can answer that are the ones who pass, because the answer is the observation — and the observation is what is being marked.
We run mock tests marked to exactly the standard above, on the routes you will actually be sent on. It is the closest thing to sitting the real one, and it is considerably less expensive than a retest.
