German driver's licenses proved inaccessible to many foreigners
As reported by "Russkaya Germaniya", more and more candidates for the right to drive a vehicle are unable to pass the theoretical exam on traffic rules on the first try. Last year – as in the year before – more than a third of participants failed this test: 2017 – 36.8 percent, 2016 – 34.8%. The practical exam in 2017 was failed by 28.1% of participants, a year earlier – 26.6 percent (here the share of failures has been rising for the third consecutive year).
If we consider separately candidates for category B licenses (which allow driving a regular passenger car, the vast majority of exam takers try to obtain), the failure rate is even higher – both in theory and practice. In 2017, 44 percent of participants failed the theoretical exam (42.7% in 2016), and 39.9% failed the practical exam (37.6% in the previous year).
A negative record was set by Saxony-Anhalt: no other federal state had such a high percentage of failures in the theoretical exam in 2017 – 44.9%. Things are almost as bad in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (44.3% each), Saxony (44.1%), Thuringia (42.5%), and Brandenburg (42.4%). Overall, young people in the east of the country perform much worse in theory than those in the west.
The best new drivers – or simply the luckiest – live in Hesse (31.4% failures) and Schleswig-Holstein (32.2%). Nevertheless, as can be seen from the KBA data, even in these states the share of those who failed theory approaches a third of all exam participants, and in the remaining western states it slightly exceeds this threshold.
The situation with the practical exam is roughly the same, but the most failures are in the city-states – Hamburg (41.%) and Bremen (38.8%), except that between them and Berlin (36.1%) the same long-suffering Saxony-Anhalt (36.4%) is wedged. In the city-states, the high failure rate is partly explained by the intensity of inner-city traffic: obviously, taking the practical exam in the provinces is somewhat easier than in a metropolis. Statistically, the best students live in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, where in 2017 about a quarter of test participants failed the driving test.
And what are the reasons for such, one might say, catastrophic failures in preparation for the theoretical exam? Representatives of the professional association of driving instructors (Bundesvereinigung der Fahrlehrerverbände) explain the high proportion of failures by the number of foreigners for whom German is not their native language. At the same time, the test can now be taken in 12 languages.
The rules do not imply any specific conditions for those who have already obtained a driver's license in their home country – immigrants just need to register and come to the exam. Many are overly self-confident and do not take the upcoming test seriously, driving school representatives believe – not only foreigners. Often it is also a matter of age: those who are well over 20 take the tests more seriously, prepare better, and ultimately fail exams less often, while the youngest students – 17-18-year-olds – often lack motivation.
Theoretically, you can retake the driver's license exam indefinitely – until the controlling authority intervenes. Examiners, seeing that there is no improvement or the number of errors is increasing, can note this in the relevant documents – and the local authorities issuing the driver's license have the right to require the unsuccessful candidate to undergo a medical-psychological assessment (MPU), during which psychologists will try to identify the reasons for repeated failures. This is a fairly rare case: usually examiners do not resort to such measures until the fourth or fifth failed exam.
The second attempt at the exam cannot immediately follow the first: after a failure, at least two weeks must pass, and if the student not only failed the test but attempted to cheat – six weeks. The practical driving exam must take place no later than 12 months after the theoretical one – otherwise the theory pass is "reset."