Who Conducts the CDL Tests in Your State?

Went to school at College of DuPage
the Sec. of State test us there
and the tester just evaluates what you know
if you fail, you earned it

 

I went to star truck driving school at south suburban college. Ya you right. Illinois isnt brutally hard at all. Only thing is you cant transfer cdl in state. But otherwise exam is good esp if you use a school. Because you know the truck and set up etc

 

I think the schools try to squeeze too much into too little time, I know the standard for an accredited program is 160 hours which is only 4 weeks but I prefer the programs that stretch it out to 6 or 8 weeks, as long as it is a continuous period without too much time off, otherwise you lose some of what was taught. 4 weeks/160 hours really isn't enough especially when you take into consideration the amount of time spent doing noting waiting for the other students to finish practicing.

As a former examiner I will say some examiners are harder than they have to be. Certain parts of the test are dictated by the AAMVA to be repeated exactly word for word, which I think is wrong. As long as you demonstrate you understand the information the wording doesn't really matter, but I have had to fail otherwise good drivers because they couldn't memorize a passage from a book. The hardest ones to fail were the experienced drivers who were only upgrading or re-certifying their license after something had changed in their life, I knew they were good, but I had to follow the rules as stupid as they are. The big problem, and why the AAMVA requires you to be a parrot is most state employed examiners do not have, nor have they ever had, a cdl so they have no idea how to do what you the student are doing. That was the nice thing about the third party program, you had to have the license and experience driving before you could become an examiner. I had to have my cdl for 1 year with no violations or accidents for the past 3 years (went back to my non-cdl) plus I had to take all the versions of the written exam and pass with 100% as well as be able to do all the skills portions in all the classes of vehicle I wanted to test. I spent two weeks in Philadelphia with the head of the PA CDL program and a group of his senior examiners, about 80 hours of class and field practice, took my skills/road test 9 different times so I could test class a,b, c plus school and passenger bus.

 

You are absolutely correct about the 50% pass rate reflecting on your instructors, sounds like a crappy achool. I am not sure what you want to do for your career but you may want to look into some of the LTL companies in Mass, many of them have dock to driver programs where they will help you obtain or upgrade your cdl, you may even find one that will use your class b. Either way, good luck, sorry to hear of your trouble with school but it does not surprise me, too many shady schools are a big reason why the drivers on the road today suck.