[Drisser]

Went on my course yesterday to avoid 3 points to picking up my mobile..

Went expecting a fairly boring thing but have to say I came away quite impressed to be honest, picked up a fair bit about some stats and some rules and regs that I didn't know about.

It was 3 hours, mostly some group discussions, nothing formal really but the 2 guys presenting were both advanced drivers / driver trainers and came across well.

Have to say I got in my car this morning and was a lot more observant and chilled as various people raced passed me, tailgated me etc.. so fair play I guess if educating people saved points and does the job.

Interestingly though one of the blokes on the course thought it was a chance to show off and roared out of the carpark afterwards in his tarted up old C class with blacked out windows, determined to stick 2 fingers up having not participated in any of the discussions all afternoon. Nob.

[DougMcL]

I did an Advanced Test with the IAM. Motorcycle version, not car version, although the principles are much the same. I was slow to do all the observed runs, debriefing and practice so it took me two years from start to finish. I went on one of these courses too, run by the AA and thought that it was all about trying to cram all of my two years into three hours. Daft. If you really enjoyed learning about attitude and advanced driving, I can highly recommend doing the IAM Skills for Life course.

[Drisser]

They did actually mention about some of the IAM courses and extra training you can do, I thought that was quite useful to showcase / inform about doing additional training.

[dobbo99]

Originally Posted by Drisser

Interestingly though one of the blokes on the course thought it was a chance to show off and roared out of the carpark afterwards in his tarted up old C class with blacked out windows, determined to stick 2 fingers up having not participated in any of the discussions all afternoon. Nob.

I did one of these last year, and thought that I would be the one doing doughnuts in the car park afterwards, but was quite surprised that I picked up some useful information as well.

[DougMcL]

Originally Posted by Drisser

They did actually mention about some of the IAM courses and extra training you can do, I thought that was quite useful to showcase / inform about doing additional training.

I took two years but I think the normal time is about three to six months. You can imagine how bored I was during the three hours... They did ask if anyone was an advanced driver but I thought it better to remain incognito. During the group work we were asked to comment on a scenario about who was at fault for a particular accident. I let the other five at my table discuss this and they came to a completely different conclusion to me. I attempted to explain why their conclusion was not quite correct and got shouted down (literally) by the whole table. There was not one apology from the rest of the group during the debrief ;-)

IAM course is mainly about observation, attitude, human factors and using a systematic approach to driving/riding. As I said above it is well worth the effort, although in my case, it didn't stop me from getting a NIP...

[Drisser]

One of the first exercises we did was going through the 4 sequences of traffic lights, happy to say I got right, but I was gobsmacked how many people didn't have a clue.

One lady on my table said it was Red, Amber, then Red Amber and Green all together ! Followed by straight to red.. I did say politely I don't think you can have all 3 lights showing at the same time as that would be a bit confusing.. and got a right dirty look !

[DougMcL]

That would be the Dunning Kruger effect in action then....

From wikipedia:
"a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is"

[CazuaLLUK]

Completed my 2nd one of these last week. Definitely very helpful.