Defensive Driving Online

I received my first speeding ticket and as a result I decided to take Defensive Driving to save some money and keep the charges off my record. That was about 3 months ago, and in typical messy mom fashion I waited until the week of the deadline to deal with it. I thought about doing the comedy course, or one that offers a meal, but instead I just went with the online version because you can do it on your time schedule.
I have written this little review about my experience so that anyone that ends up having to go through it will know what to expect.

No matter what, if you are taking defensive driving in the state of Texas it will cost a minimum of $25.00 and 6 hours to complete. This is required by law, so I went for the minimum! I chose to go with www.defensivedriving.com and the advantage is that you have 30 days to complete it so you can do it all at once or stretch it out over a month. I did about 4 hours last night and completed the remaining 2 hours, plus the exam (which only took a couple minutes) today.

I was dreading going through this course, but in the end it wasn't so bad. It is almost like a game. They want to ensure that you are actually going through all 11 lessons, so you will be asked questions throughout. If you miss a total of 13 questions you will not be permitted to continue. I think I missed 8 total and it really freaked me out every time I got one wrong, because the last thing I wanted was to be expelled from defensive driving school. Most of the stuff is pretty obvious, but there are some things you need to know like how much space you should allow in between vehicles to merge onto the highway? The answer is 4 seconds. I only know that because I wrote it down. I took notes and skimmed the text as well as watched videos while taking a bath or folding laundry (you can't do that while at a comedy club). The only problem is there is a little speedometer at the top of on your screen that shows how many pages you have completed and how many are left.


If you don't spend enough time in the lesson it will warn you that you are "speeding" which ironically is how most of us got into this mess in the first place, and you will have to review for the remainder of the time.

However you can also take too long. If you were to leave your computer on and just wait in the another room for your time run out you would be automatically logged off after 7 minutes. So what I did, because most lessons didn't take nearly the amount of the alloted time, I would just set my own personal timer for 5 minutes and then do something else and come back to change the page before it logged me off.

I may be a bit of an underachiever, but I passed and I still have a clean record which I fully intend to keep that way!