Which Online Traffic School? – A Review of I Drive Safely

Stop Sign by aprilzosia

A few weeks ago I received a ticket for doing ~50MPH on a 35MPH zone. In order to avoid points on my driving record and the resulting increase in car insurance I opted for Traffic School. Being technically inclined and lazy to actually attend a class in person I chose to explore the online options available. After looking around I settled on IDriveSafely.com and having just completed the course I thought I’d share some thoughts.

In general, I found the site to be very clean, highly available and functional.

Signup
Signing up for the course was a snap. One hint here is that if you have an AAA membership in California or Nevada, I Drive Safely offers discounts on those memberships (currently 10%). During sign-up you’re also asked to answer some questions that only you would know the answers to, for use in authentication during the course.

Content
The course itself consisted of 12 sections followed by a final exam. Each section would cover different aspects of driving such as driving on highways, driving under the influence of intoxicants etc. Each section involved ~10 pages of reading and some flash animations to illustrate concepts. The content is excellent and if you’re actually looking to learn from this experience, they do a good job of teaching you some useful driving concepts/road skills.

Course Flow
At the end of each section you would get a page of 10 multiple choice questions (selected randomly from a pool) which you had to answer correctly to proceed to the next section. If you got any questions wrong, you would be taken back to the material covering the questions you answered incorrectly before being shown another 10 questions selected at random.

While being shown the content, at some point in the middle (selected randomly) you’re prompted to answer one of the questions you answered during signup. This is done to authenticate you as the person who signed up for the quiz and should theoretically make it a little harder to have someone else take the course for you.

You’re free to save the state of your progress at any time. I completed my course in increments of 15-30 mins over a period of a week. You can pause the course, leave and come back to start at where you left off.

Receiving Credit
After completing the 12 sections, there’s a “final exam”. This consists of 25 multiple choice questions covering content from the previous 12 sections (and possibly questions you’ve seen before in the section completion tests). You need to score 90% to receive credit for the course.

Endgame
They mailed me my copy of the completion certificate yesterday and since I have plenty of time till the due date I selected regular mail. You also have the option of having it mailed to the court directly, but given my lack of rush and desire to see and keep a copy of the certificate I asked for it to be delivered to my residence.

Final Thoughts
My experience with IDriveSafely.com has been very positive up to this point. The one thing I would say is that if you’re looking for an easy way to deal with traffic school, this is not it. But given you got busted, and you feel the need to deserve the traffic school credit I Drive Safely does a good job.

I requested the certificate to be mailed to my home address (although it is possible to have them send it directly to some courts), and it arrived in 2 days. I sent that to the court where it was promptly accepted and my ticket was closed without incurring points on my driving record. Overall, I was very pleased with the service and highly recommend it.

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