How Many Fail DMV Written Test: a) Some? b) Lots? c) Most?

Are half the motorists in California incompetents?

One would hope not, but you wouldn't know it by how poorly they perform on the Department of Motor Vehicles' written license tests--so poorly that the DMV made the test easier to pass.

A study commissioned last year by the DMV left agency officials stunned by how poorly license applicants are performing: People are failing more than half the time they take the test.

Individuals taking the test in English for the first time fail a stunning 64% of the time, while the failure rate for Spanish-language takers is even higher, at 75%. In some field offices around the state, the overall failure rate is 82%. The study was based on a two-day sampling of tests administered at every DMV field office. A lot of California residents have suspected for some time that this was the sorry state of affairs. A Your Wheels reader from Redondo Beach recently wrote about his visit to a DMV office, where he learned that the woman in line ahead of him had answered every question on the test wrong.

"I walked to my car in the DMV lot," he wrote, "and it came to my mind: Am I driving on the streets with the person who missed all the questions on the test?"

Ray Peck, the nationally respected chief of research at the DMV in Sacramento, is no less concerned.

"We were shocked and surprised at the magnitude of the rate of the failure," Peck said. "It implies a lack of knowledge. It is always possible that there are other issues--language skills or poor reading comprehension."

Of course, the DMV attempts to ensure that English-language skills are not an issue. It administers the driving test in 34 languages, including Hmong, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese and, of course, Spanish.

Under current state law, drivers have to be tested every 12 years. For people with lousy records, testing is more frequent. Across the vast territory of California, 6 million tests are given annually--which means that legions of applicants go home feeling humbled and maybe a little stupid every year. By contrast, drivers in other states pass tests 80% of the time, experts say.

After DMV officials got over their shock regarding the study, titled "Evaluation of the Class C Driver License Written Knowledge Tests," they set to work on solving the problem.

The DMV's tests attempt to determine people's knowledge of traffic laws and check their basic understanding of motoring. The test has a multiple-choice format, with four possible answers for every question.