The Berean
Well-known member
I don't know how California's tests are written, but in Indiana many of the questions are so ambiguous that I know several bright native speakers who nearly gave up after failing 3-4 times. For years I held a public passenger CDL to drive a bus, yet I remember prior to that I never aced a written driving exam. I always missed at least one answer since, depending how you interpreted the poorly structured questions, there might be more than one possible answer and you had to guess what they meant. I can't imagine how a language barrier might affect it, even if the test was written in Spanish. One might also have to consider who might have structured the test and whether or not they might have any ulterior motives as to the outcomes.
One issue is that the many of the immigrants have very poor reading skills due to lack of education. One of my friends at church is a teacher and we have had long discussions on the plight of immigrant and low income children and their struggles in school. One point that my friend made was that parental involvement is important to a child's educational success. He further made the point that the immigrant parents not only do not speak English but their Spanish writing and reading comprehension is also very poor. My friend is half Chinese/half white and his Spanish is far better than the majority of immigrant parents he meets at student-parent meetings. People with 2nd-3rd grade education will probably have great difficulty in reading the written driver's test which are written at an 8th grade reading level I believe. Here is a sample written test.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/d...1QdTLH5U/dl5/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/?lang=en