The examiner marks three grades of fault: driving, serious and dangerous. You pass with no more than 15 driving faults and none of the other two. Almost nobody fails on the count. Most people fail on a single serious fault in a drive that was otherwise perfectly reasonable.
Examiners do not mark style. They mark whether a fault occurred and how bad it was, against a fixed sheet that is the same in Wanstead as it is in Wolverhampton. That is a much narrower job than most learners imagine while they sit in the waiting room, and knowing exactly how narrow it is takes a surprising amount of the fear out of the thing.
Everything below comes from the DVSA's own description of what happens during the test. Nothing here is a rumour about what examiners "like".
The Three Grades of Fault
Every mark on the sheet is one of three things.
| Grade | What it means | Effect on the result |
|---|---|---|
| Driving fault | A mistake that was not potentially dangerous on this occasion. Commonly called a minor. | Counts towards a limit of 15 |
| Serious fault | Something potentially dangerous, or a breach of the law | Ends the test as a fail |
| Dangerous fault | Something that involved actual danger to you, the examiner, the public or property | Ends the test as a fail |
Grades and pass criteria as published by the DVSA at gov.uk/driving-test.
Serious and dangerous faults are together what people mean by a "major". On the result they are separate boxes, but for your purposes they do the same job: one of either ends the test. The difference between them is covered in serious and dangerous faults, and what ends a test.
What Passing Actually Requires
Two conditions, both of which have to hold:
- No more than 15 driving faults
- No serious fault and no dangerous fault
Sixteen driving faults is a fail. One serious fault is a fail with zero driving faults on the sheet. There is no partial credit, no rounding in your favour and no discretion about the numbers. What the examiner does have discretion over is the grade a given mistake gets, and that is where the whole test really lives.
The Shape of the Test
A car test lasts around 35 minutes and runs in a fixed order. There is no version of it where the examiner improvises.
- An eyesight check in the car park: read a number plate at 20 metres for a new-style plate, 20.5 metres for an old one. Fail this and the test ends there and counts as an attempt.
- One "tell me" safety question, answered while parked, before you drive.
- General driving on the centre's routes, with one "show me" question asked while you are moving.
- One reversing manoeuvre out of three.
- Possibly an emergency stop. It is not on every test.
- Between 20 and 35 minutes of independent driving, following either a sat nav or road signs.
The safety questions are worth one driving fault between them at most, and the full published set of 21 is reproduced in show me, tell me: all 21 questions with answers.
Almost Nobody Fails on the Count
This is the single most useful thing to understand about the marking, and it is the opposite of what most learners assume. Fifteen driving faults is a lot of driving faults. It is roughly one every two and a half minutes for the whole test. Candidates who drive well enough to be sitting a test at all rarely get near it.
What ends tests is one serious fault. A single moment at one junction, in the middle of thirty-four otherwise unremarkable minutes, and the sheet says fail. That asymmetry should change what you worry about. The right question is not "am I tidy enough", it is "is there any point on this route where I could do something a passenger would call dangerous".
How a Driving Fault Turns Into a Serious One
Three routes, and learners tend to only know about the first.
The mistake was worse than usual
The same action can be graded differently depending on what was around it. Pulling out of a side road without a proper right-hand check is a driving fault if the road was genuinely empty and a serious fault if a cyclist was coming. The action is identical. The risk it created is not, and the risk is what is being graded.
You did it repeatedly
A fault repeated often enough stops looking like a slip and starts looking like a habit, and an examiner can escalate a repeated driving fault to a serious one. Rolling back a foot at one hill start is a minor. Doing it at every hill start on a Chingford route is a pattern, and it will be marked as one.
The examiner had to intervene
If the examiner takes the wheel, uses the dual controls, or says something to prevent an incident, that is recorded as a serious or dangerous fault. There is no version of an intervention that is marked as a minor. It is the clearest line on the whole sheet.
What Is Not Being Marked
A fair amount of test anxiety is spent on things that carry no marks at all.
- Nerves. Visible nerves are not a fault. Only what they cause you to do is.
- A wrong turn during independent driving. Explicitly not a fault. How you drive while going the wrong way still is, and that is the real trap.
- Being slightly off-square in a bay. Ending up a little crooked is a driving fault at worst. Not looking round while you reverse is the thing that costs people.
- Talking, or not talking. Examiners are not scoring conversation.
- Which manoeuvre you get. The examiner picks it. You do not, and the choice is not a judgement about you.
The corollary is that a lot of what feels like a disaster in the moment is not marked at all, and a lot of what feels like nothing is. Stalling once at a busy junction and restarting calmly is often a single driving fault or none.
Creeping into a junction to see past parked cars while a car is coming is a serious fault, and it can feel like ordinary driving while you do it.
Reading the Marking Sheet
At the end you are handed a sheet with a grid of about two dozen categories down the side, and columns for driving, serious and dangerous faults. Every mark is placed against a named category, which means the sheet tells you exactly what happened rather than just how many times.
Three driving faults spread across three different categories and three driving faults all in "junctions, observation" are the same number and completely different problems. The first is an ordinary drive. The second is a habit that was one busier junction away from ending the test. Ask the examiner to talk you through the sheet at the end. They will, pass or fail, and it takes two minutes.
The categories that fill up most often across Great Britain are published by the DVSA every year, and they barely move. Observation at junctions has been first for a long time, and what each of the top ten looks like on an East London road is set out in the top ten reasons people fail.
What This Should Change About the Way You Practise
If the result is decided by serious faults rather than by the count, then the useful preparation is not more repetitions of a bay park in an empty car park. It is driving the kind of roads where a serious fault is actually available to you.
In East London that means junctions where parked cars run right up to the give-way line, so the only way to see is to inch out with your observation held rather than take one look and go.
It means multi-lane approaches on the A12 and the A406 where the lane has to be chosen early and held. It means box junctions, timed bus lanes, and cycle lanes on main roads where a car-door width of drift matters.
Route familiarity does the rest. Knowing that the third exit off a particular roundabout comes up faster than it looks is not cheating. It is the difference between reading a junction and reacting to it, and the DVSA test routes near Wanstead punish reacting.
The order it all fits into, from provisional licence to test day, is in the complete guide to learning to drive in East London.
One Last Thing About Grades
Examiners are not looking for reasons to fail you and they are not looking for reasons to pass you. They are recording what happened against a fixed list.
That sounds cold, and it is the most reassuring fact on this page: the sheet does not care whether you seemed confident, whether you were chatty, or whether the examiner liked you. It records the driving. Drive safely and legally for 35 minutes and the sheet has nothing to say.
A mock test is the only way to see your own marking sheet before it counts, because it is scored the same way and run over the same kind of route.
Book a mock testCommon questions about test marking
How many faults can you get on a driving test?
You can get up to 15 driving faults and still pass, as long as you have no serious or dangerous fault. Sixteen driving faults is a fail. In practice very few candidates fail on the count; a single serious fault is what ends most tests.
Does the examiner tell you if you have failed during the test?
No. The test continues to the end unless it becomes unsafe to carry on. You will not be told the result until you are parked back at the centre, so an incident you think ended it may not have been marked the way you assumed. Keep driving properly to the end.
What is the difference between a serious and a dangerous fault?
A serious fault is something potentially dangerous or a breach of the law. A dangerous fault involved actual danger to you, the examiner, the public or property. Both end the test, and both are what people mean when they say "major".
Can the examiner fail you for being nervous?
Not for the nerves themselves. Nerves are not on the marking sheet. What can be marked is anything the nerves cause, such as missed observation, hesitating so long at a junction that you hold up traffic, or stalling repeatedly.
Do you get to see the marking sheet?
Yes. You are given it at the end and the examiner will go through it with you whether you passed or failed. It is worth asking which categories the marks fell in rather than just how many there were, because that is what tells you what to work on.
If you want to know how many faults you would collect today rather than guess, a mock test at £50 answers it before the £62 one does.
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Published 1 September 2026. Prices and DVSA figures are checked when this page is revised. If anything here has changed, ring us and we will confirm it.