Guide
The Faults That Fail Most Tests, Marked The Way The Tester Marks Them
The Snugborough roundabout in Blanchardstown fails more learners than nerves ever will. Not because it is a hard bit of road. Because of four or five small habits nobody ever pulled you up on, and every one of them is fixable the second you can see it.
People blame the fail on nerves, because nerves are nobody's fault. Twenty-odd years reading the road for a living tells you something less flattering and a lot more useful. A short list of habits fails most tests, the same ones over and over, and here they are the way the RSA tester actually marks them.
The mirror you never really read
Not the mirror you flicked your eyes at. The one you actually took something from. A tester watches your head and your eyes, and they can tell a look for information from a look for show. Every lane change, every turn, moving off, pulling in, it all starts with a mirror you read for real. Skip it and it is a fault. Skip it before something that mattered and it is a grade three. Coming through Coolmine at half four, that mirror is the whole difference between pulling out and pulling out into somebody.
Observation at the junction
Rolling up to a junction and easing out on half a look is the classic one. You want proper observation, both ways, and often a second look, because the first one at a busy junction was taken too early to be worth anything. Creeping out on a hope instead of a look is where a lot of tests quietly end. Ask any taxi driver which junctions bite, and it is always the ones where you cannot see a thing until you are already halfway committed.
The usual suspects
- Mirrors
- Checked for real, before every signal and move.
- Junctions
- Proper observation, a second look when it is busy.
- Speed
- Too slow is a fault as much as too fast.
- Roundabouts
- Right lane, right routine, no cutting across.
Speed, both ways
Everyone expects too fast to get marked. Fewer expect too slow, and it gets marked just the same. Trundling well under the limit on a clear, safe road holds up the traffic behind you and tells the tester you are not reading the road, you are just frightened of it. Drive at the speed the road and the conditions are asking for. On the Navan Road at rush hour that is slower than the sign says. On an empty stretch out past Clonsilla it is not. The trick is that you are picking the speed off the road, not off your own nerves.
The roundabout, again
It earns its own line because it fails more people than anything else on the test. Wrong lane, no signal, or a cut across somebody to reach an exit. All of it sorts itself out if you settle the lane on the approach instead of in the middle of the circle. The map version of Snugborough and the real version are two different roads, and the real one is the only one you are actually driving.
None of this is a talent problem. Every one of them is a habit, and a habit is only a thing you have done the same way often enough that it set, with nobody in the seat beside you to catch it. Usually that somebody was teaching you for free and meant well by it. A habit that got in that easy comes back out the same way, once a good instructor names it out loud.
At least one of these is almost certainly yours right now, and you cannot see it yet, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. That is what the pretest lessons are for, and it is what the twelve EDT lessons are quietly ironing out of you long before you ever pull up for the test itself.