The Gary Meggs Pre-Test Method

By the time your test is booked you can drive. That was the easy part, and it's done. The last few lessons aren't about learning to drive. They're about un-learning the four or five habits that fail people who can already drive perfectly well.

Hands placed correctly on the steering wheel, the kind of settled control the pre-test work is meant to make automatic — Not a new skill. An old one, done cleanly, every time, until the tester has nothing to write down.

Every learner arrives at the test with a handful of faults they don't know they have. That's normal. Nobody sees their own habits. My whole pre-test method is built around one job: finding those faults and killing them before a tester does it for you.

First I mark you like the test marks you

I sit you on the actual test routes and I score you the way the tester will. Grade one, grade two, grade three. A grade three is a straight fail and it doesn't forgive. Rolling the stop line, cutting a roundabout, a mirror skipped before a manoeuvre. You need to feel where you're throwing grade threes without noticing, because the tester certainly will.

The faults that fail people

Observation at junctions, not the big obvious looks but the quick real one before you move. Roundabout lane discipline. Mirror before signal before move, in that order and meant. Speed that's too timid as often as too quick. None of these are hard. All of them are habits, and habits are what we fix.

Then we drill until it's boring

A fault you fixed once under instruction is not fixed. It's fixed when your hands do it without you thinking, on a road you've never seen, with a bus behind you. So we repeat it until it's dull. Nerves aren't beaten with breathing exercises at ten to eleven. They're worn down by having done the thing so many times your body knows it cold.

The routes are not a secret, they're a rehearsal

People think driving the test routes is cheating. It isn't. The tester isn't testing whether you know the road. They're testing whether you drive well on it. Knowing the roundabout is coming just means you meet it as a driver instead of a tourist, which is exactly how you'll meet every roundabout for the rest of your life.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't make a bad driver pass. If the basics aren't there, we go back and build them first, and I'll tell you straight rather than take your money for a test you'll fail. The pre-test work is polish. It only works on something already built.

Nerves aren't beaten with tips at ten to eleven. They're worn down until your hands know the job without you.
The pre-test method

You're closer than you think. Now do the roundabout again.