Like most teens his age, 16-year-old Kyle Ray of Mount Horeb approached his road test at the Department of Motor Vehicles with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension.

“I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be nervous the first time you go,” he said outside his driver’s education class a few weeks before his scheduled road test this month, the DMV’s busiest testing month.

But teens are nervous about more than just whether they’ll pass the parallel parking portion of the test. They’re also fretting over where they’ll take their test.

“I heard the East Side is easier,” said Eleyne Buzhunashvili, 16, referring to the DMV’s Madison East service center. Dane County’s only other road testing center is on the West Side.

“I heard it from all my friends that have taken their driver’s test,” she said. “... They heard from other people that it was easier to pass there, and that’s where they passed.”

The rumor has been around for more than a decade, area driving instructors say. Now, it seems, there might be something to it.

A State Journal review of recent DMV records has revealed wide variation in the average road test pass/fail rates among the state’s service centers, including a large spread between Madison’s two testing centers. Over the past five years, examiners at the East Side center failed fewer than two in 10 drivers. At the West Side, three in 10 drivers flunked — a 74 percent higher fail rate.

Statewide, road test failure rates ranged last year from less than 10 percent in Algoma to almost 50 percent in Black River Falls.

Testing gap
The testing gap comes as no surprise to Judy Hudson, 4 Lakes Driving School general manager and vice president. In the 14 years she’s been with the school, she’s heard plenty about how much harder the tests are at Madison West.

“It’s what kids talk about in school,” she said. “If they can get an East Side test, they’re going to head to the East Side because they just know they have a better chance of passing a road test.”

Kurt Schultz has heard the same as driver education program coordinator for the Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA) 2, which administers driver’s education for many public high schools in Dane County.

“A lot of people actually leave Madison and go down to Monroe, or if they’re up on the northern side they’ll head up to (Portage), just to stay out of (Madison West),” he said. “I believe it is well known amongst the students. The students even know who’s a bad examiner to get. ‘If you get this one, do this and this and this.’”

Hudson emphasized that “there’s nothing wrong with getting a hard road test because we don’t want these kids dead, you know? We want these kids to know what they’re doing.”

But she said students are already scared about failing. “If they were to fail, you know, that’s humiliating,” she said.

Examiners monitored
Kristina Boardman, director of the Bureau of Field Services at the DMV, said while the agency is aware of the wide difference between average failure rates at its service centers across the state, it focuses more on monitoring individual examiners.

“While trends can be the result of a number of things, ... individual failed skills tests are the result of just one thing — poor driving behavior during that test,” she wrote in response to questions about the State Journal’s findings.

In that response, Boardman said the DMV ensures testing objectivity by:

• Regularly re-evaluating test routes across the state to make sure they are similarly complex and fair.

• Providing examiners with refresher training regularly.

• Monitoring examiners’ pass/fail records, usually quarterly, and providing an “accelerated review” and sometimes retraining examiners whose “pass rate” strays 5 percent above or below their team’s average.

“One thing our examiners don’t do is pass or fail people,” she wrote. “The driver takes responsibility for that result during their exam.”

Examiner differences
Nevertheless, DMV records suggest individual examiners can play a big role in the outcome of their tests.

Of the 11 examiners at Madison West who administered more than 100 road tests for class D — or regular noncommercial — driver’s licenses in 2008, six gave failing marks to 35 percent or more of the tests they graded, including one examiner who failed almost half of them. The lowest fail rate among those examiners was 22 percent.

Two of the West Side examiners with high failure rates are team leaders who typically have a higher fail rate because they are often given more difficult drivers, including those who are taking their test for a second or more time, Boardman said. But two others — including one with a 48 percent fail rate — have been counseled by the DMV to make sure they know how to properly score the driving skills tests.

Conversely, of the seven examiners at Madison East who administered more than 100 class D tests in 2008, the highest failure rate was 27 percent in 2008. The lowest was 12 percent.

Statewide, the DMV considers 25 percent to be a normal failure rate, Boardman said. About 75 percent of drivers statewide pass the first time they take the skills test, 19 percent need two tests to get their license, 4 percent pass on the third try, and 2 percent require between four and six tests to pass, she said.

Examiners’ viewpoint
Two Madison examiners interviewed for this story said that while they couldn’t explain the wide difference in the fail rates of the two centers, they didn’t think examiners at either center were scoring tests inappropriately.

At the Madison East center, Esteban Zandate, who has been an examiner for the last four years, has seen a wide range of driving abilities out on his tests.

There are the truly dangerous candidates, like the man last year who waited so long to make a left onto Fair Oaks Avenue from East Washington Avenue that the light had changed when he finally turned, causing a crash as an oncoming minivan smashed into the passenger side of the Honda sedan where Zandate sat. No one was hurt, and predictably, the driver failed.

Then there was the teenage girl who drove almost flawlessly during the test, scoring only two points out of a permitted 25, he said. But when she went to park at the end of the test, she hit a car parked in an adjacent space. Another automatic failure.

There are maneuvers that frequently cause people to fail on the route, like making a turn into the wrong lane, he said. But the frequency of failures seems to rise and fall in waves.

“It’s really strange, because some days you have a really good day, and others you have a lot of bad drivers,” he said.

Zandate suggested that maybe the West Side’s proximity to the university makes it more likely to receive foreign drivers who may have less experience with U.S. road rules and may not always understand the examiner’s directions. People with foreign driver’s licenses must test for a new license after living in Wisconsin for one year, but like any driver, they’re not required to take driving instruction if they are older than 18. The DMV doesn’t keep demographic records for road tests.

“You know, a lot of people think that they can drive, but the rules here (in the United States) are different,” he said.

Kim Slonaker, a Madison West examiner since 2007, suggested that Madison West may also have more people who reschedule their test on the day they were to take it, which often gets counted as a failure, depending on how much advance notice the service center gets.

Big responsibility
But ultimately, Slonaker and Zandate don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their pass/fail records. For them, the responsibility of being the last hurdle between hundreds of inexperienced drivers and the open road is a much heavier burden.

“Part of our job isn’t just to make sure that you can drive, it’s to keep everybody safe, and we speak up before somebody get’s hurt,” Slonaker said.

It’s emotionally deflating for drivers young and old when they fail the driving test. Many cry; some try to convince the examiner to let them try again; a small number even try to bribe their examiner, Slonaker said.

“We have to be strong,” Zandate said. But thinking about the consequences of being too lenient keeps them in line, said Slonaker, especially when news comes of another teen dead on the road.

“If somebody — a kid — died in a car accident, you really wanted to hope that it wasn’t you that passed them, especially if they did something that they shouldn’t have been doing,” said Slonaker, who takes her own 18-year-old son on road tests as often as she can get in the car with him.

“So many of them think this (the test) is the end, and it’s not. It’s the beginning,” Zandate said.

Learn from mistakes
For Kyle Ray, his first test at Madison West on Tuesday certainly wasn’t the end.

He failed early in the test, he said, when nerves and driving his grandmother’s car instead of his own made for a bad combination and he hopped a curb — an automatic failure.

He and the examiner, Madison West team leader Stan Lamont, finished the test anyway, and at the end Lamont gave Ray several pointers on the things Ray did and didn’t do.

Ray’s been practicing every day since then in preparation for his next test, scheduled for June 25, and is using his score sheet from the test to help him learn from his mistakes.

“I’m more informed now and know more about my flaws,” Ray said.

Zandate would applaud that attitude.

“Always keep learning,” he said. “There are so many bad drivers out there.”

Ray is optimistic about his upcoming road test. He’s planning a road trip to visit friends in Dallas when he has his license and he recently bought his dream car, a 1998 Pontiac Trans Am, to go there in.

He knows more of what to expect now, he says, and he plans on driving his own car next time.

He did schedule his next test in Dodgeville, however.

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DRIVER’S LICENSE TEST ANALYSIS
• Since 2004, the Madison East center has consistently had an annual fail rate of between 17 percent and 21 percent. The fail rate at the Madison West center has fluctuated between 30 percent and 35 percent over that time.

• Of the 11 examiners who administered more than 100 road tests (class D only) at Madison West in 2008, six gave failing marks to 35 percent or more of the drivers they tested. One of those examiners failed about one out of every two test-takers. The lowest fail rate from that group of examiners was 22 percent.

• Of the seven examiners who gave more than 100 road tests at Madison East, the highest fail rate was 27 percent in 2008. The lowest was 12 percent.

• From 2005 to 2008, the fail rates for teens under 18 at Madison East ranged from 11 percent to 13 percent, compared to 19 percent to 22 percent on the West Side. Although Madison East tests more teens than Madison West, they constitute about the same percentage of test-takers at both centers.

• Of the service centers that administered more than 200 tests in the Southwest region from 2004 to 2008, the Tomah service center had the lowest fail rate with about 12 percent of its 4,071 tests resulting in a failing grade. The Black River Falls center had the highest fail rate, flunking about 46 percent of the center’s 1,534 test takers.

• About 26 percent of 166,951 tests administered in the Southwest region between 2004 and 2008 resulted in failures. Statewide, about 28 percent of the 622,407 tests administered in those five years were failed.

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DRIVER’S LICENSE TEST FAIL RATES
Road Test Failure Rates for DMV Service Centers in the Southwest Region in 2008