ADI pass rates
ADI pass rates cause many people to worry but they’re very misleading.
Let’s look at how pass rates can give you the wrong idea.
We’re going to imagine that 100 people begin training as instructors and we’ll see how many make it through based on official DVSA pass rates for the 2017/18 financial year.
The part one figures are national. The part 2 and 3 are for Birmingham’s South Yardley test centre and are rounded to the nearest whole figure.
Part 1 – 53% so 53 people will make it to part 2
Part 2 – 48% so we’ve just lost 25 people and have 27 left to go to part 3.
Part 3 – 22% pass so 6 of the 27 people from part 2 qualified.
That looks quite bad doesn’t it? Only 6 people got through? No, actually a lot more would have got through.
How pass rates fool people
If the part 1 pass rate is 50% then that doesn’t mean only 50% of people are passing, it means 50% of tests are failed.
Imagine that 100 people took part 1 and all failed. The same 100 people then took it again and they all passed. The pass rate would still be 50% and yet all the people have passed! People are easily fooled by statistics.
It’s the same for part 2 and 3. It’s common to wait 3 to 6 months for a part 2 or 3 test date and the figures above are only for a financial year: April 2017 to April 2018. Therefore, all those figures mean is that 48% passed within those 12 months.
If everyone then took the test again in May 2018 and they all passed then everybody is qualifying yet the pass rate of 48% would still stand.
The official figures
You can read official pass rates here.
As you’ll see they make for quite glum reading! The pass rates themselves are low but if you’ve read what I wrote above then you’ll understand why things aren’t as bad as they look.
Make sure you read my page the truth about being a driving instructor.
