After a few months of studying on my own, I took a one-day driving theory crash course at this…read moreschool. Actually I ended up having to cancel at the last minute because I had pneumonia, and whereas the CBR will give you a refund if you cancel for illness reasons, this place wouldn't. I had to pay most of their class fee, again, for a rescheduled class, even though they claim a part of their fee is to pay the CBR exam fee, so you end up paying the CBR exam fee twice through them. This really pissed me off and was poor customer service.
When I attended the rescheduled class, the woman teaching was just reading off of powerpoint slides, and was getting all sorts of information wrong. She was very unprofessional. When students would ask her about wrong or confusing information she had a very low threshold for answering questions and would get annoyed pretty quickly. Even when a slide said that clearance around a car is X number of meters for an attached load on the car, she claimed the slide was wrong. Even if other people were pointing out she was wrong according to their theory books, she still insisted they and the slide were wrong.
At the end of the class they had this snazzy animated set of right-of-way questions that she was supposed to have people answer, and that would show them an animated illustration of how things would play out based on if they chose correctly who had the right-of-way in an intersection. So for example if you got the right-of-way order wrong as to who could go first, maybe a pedestrian gets run over, or two cars crash, or a bike gets bumped by a tram. As far as I can tell, this driving school spent a lot of money paying someone to animate all these different driving scenarios, and the teacher wouldn't let the animated scenarios play out. Even after repeated complaints and requests by the students to see the animated sequences so we could picture the right-of-way rules better, she would just skip the animations and move on to the next question, she said in order to save time. This ended up costing a lot more time, because people were asking a lot more questions without the animated visual aide.
But in the end I did pass my theory exam on the first try, so there is that. I don't know if that's because of all my previous self-study efforts, or if it was due to this class, but I passed. It's probably a combination of both of these things. I studied a lot and took lots of online practice tests, and while this class was pretty bad, it was not so terrible that I didn't get anything out of it. Just having someone cram the important stuff into your head a day or two before the exam helped a lot.
