Firstly get some resources at your disposal. The highway code is a must, you need to know what the rules of the road are! I also invested in a box set from BSM (the driving school i’m learning with) which included the highway code, a book full of all the questions currently on the theory test and a DVD with practice hazzard perception materials (which were invaluable as you can’t really practice that bit any other way). I also had a CD-ROM with theory test questions on it which you could practice and it had a bank of practice papers you could take as well. I’d borrowed this from my fiance who passed his test 9 years ago so it was a little out of date but was still relevant (you could pick up a newer version of one though).
I practiced with these materials and out on the road on driving lessons or in the car with my fiance on trips for about a month or so. I spent lunchtimes reading through the practice question book I got from BSM and then booked my test for a month’s time when I felt I was ready to take my test. Then I studied hard right up until the day of the test.
The test is split into multi-choice questions and the hazzard perception parts. There are 50 multi-choice questions which you have 57 minutes to answer. I’m not sure what the pass grade is but it’s pretty high. There are 14 hazzard perception clips each lasting roughly a minute with 15 hazzards meaning 1 clip has 2 hazzards.
My advice when taking the test would be to stay calm and read the questions carefully several times before answering that way you won’t make any silly mistakes as it’s easy to rush and think you know the answer especially if you’ve revised a lot. Don’t waste all that hard work by going fast and steaming through them without taking a closer, more considered look.
The hazzard perception is a tricky one. Don’t be tempted to be trigger happy with the mouse. If you click too many times or too rhymically the computer will think you’re cheating. I suffered this fate on the double hazzard clip as I clicked every time I saw what I thought was a hazzard forming. In hindsight I should have clicked less often and clicked when I saw each situation change rather than clicking every few seconds in the hope the machine had registered the click for the hazzard. Incidently when you do click to say you’ve seen a hazzard the computer puts a flag at the bottom of the screen to say it’s registered that you’ve clicked.
If you do click to many times and the computer thinks you’re cheating it will score you 0 and tell you that you have scored this because of the clicking pattern. If this happens don’t panic. What helped me when this happened was realising i’d done this in the past on a practice test and had still passed. If i’d panicked too much I think I would have failed because I wouldn’t have been concentrating on the hazzards in the following clips.
If you want more information on the test then I recomend checking out the DSA’s website. They have just launched a new site with practice material on it which you can access for £6.99 a month or there’s 2 free multi-choice tests on there. I’d recommend taking those as a practice for how the real thing is set out as it’s exactly the same but you don’t have to fork out the £6.99 just buy some books about it. They’re cheaper and you can keep them for further down the line as a refresher (or if heaven forbid you fail) you can’t really do that with a month’s access to a website.
Here’s the link to the DSA’s website: http://www.theory-tests.co.uk/
Oh and in case you’re interested I passed my test. I got 50/50 for my multi-choice and 55 out of 75 for the hazzard perception (you need 44 to pass) I scored 0 on my double hazzard clip because I clicked too many times so be careful!
