Western Pacific Truck School - The Road To Failure

Brett Aquila: Can you point us to any resources that show a school with a 98% passing rate on the DMV exams?

I believe there is one in Modesto that is above it. I had linked to it on the WPTS facebook page, but they deleted it. Real fast since I don't want to waste time digging through fact sheets, here is the closest I see right now. Academy of Truck Driving. The reason it's for 2012 and 2013 is simply because 2013 is the latest reporting year on the BPPE website (Yes, it doesn't make any sense). http://www.bppe.ca.gov/annual_report/2013/0106731_pfs.pdf

The sum of the rate of passage for all programs / the sum of total taking the exam, for both years = 234/239 ~= 97.9% So I'm 0.1% wrong pretending that is the best, which it isn't. :P

Another great example of total cluelessness. Tell me Ryan, after you get your CDL and go to your first company are they going to give you the truck you want? Are they going to let you drive the truck you trained in at school because you're comfortable with it? When the truck you're comfortable with hits 500,000 miles and they reassign you a different truck because they want to trade that one in are you going to come back here and blast the company's management for it? Is that also going to be considered passive/aggressiveness or incompetence on the part of management?

Surely you understand the difference between being given a different truck that you've never driven in, and then being tested with it before you have a feel for it all, after not having the opportunity to drive and practice anything for months, is vastly different than being given a different truck in general. Further, I was only decent at driving their only modern truck. It was the old clunky models with loose steering and destroyed gears that gave me all sorts of trouble - this is the kind I got for my test.

Also, you guys are pointing out things I did not know about the industry to attempt to undermine... what? I've already admitted to being an incompetent truck driver, and attending a school at all gives evidence to my having decided to become a truck driver without knowing a lot of things. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone... I could just go pass the exam and drive. My incompetence as a truck driver is being addressed by going to a different school because this one didn't do it for me. I call out incompetence when I see it when it relates to me and when it relates to others. What is going on here is that you don't like me, and so you are suspending parts of your critical thinking when it accommodates mocking, insulting, or discrediting me. As I said to start with, this post wasn't meant for a veteran truck driver. It was meant for a noob, as I fully admit I am. When it comes to things I describe you believe I should have known, they are now things that noobs will know when they read my post. I could devolve into flinging poo with you again, but we know you have the upper hand since you can simply delete everything I say, and it doesn't really prove anything anyway. The status quo is not a measure of what is right - it is a measure of is.

I do not call everyone in the industry an idiot. Infact, I have some exceedingly positive things to say about a select few.

What is going on here is that you don't like me, and so

It's not that we don't like you. I mean, we don't even know you. But you admittedly don't like people and you have an arrogant attitude and everyone knows it. That alone means we can't really use a lot of what you're saying because your experiences aren't going to translate to most other people.

A lot of the conflicts you're experiencing are of your own doing but you fail to realize that or admit it. Like I said, you went to school with a classroom full of people and many of them got their CDL and they're out there making a living. They had the same school, the same instructors, the same equipment, the same amount of training, and the same examiners you did and they made it through just fine.

So how can we know how much of the problem lies with you and how much lies with the school? We can't. As the exam rates show from a few years ago only a little more than half their students are passing the exam the first time. That's obviously not good. So that's on them. But that's all I know about them objectively.

I don't know much about you either but I do know enough to say that you're obviously the cause of a lot of the problems you're having. Anyone can see that. With your attitude you're going to make enemies and we have no idea what lengths they'll go to in order to keep you from succeeding. So it's not at all a stretch to consider the idea that the instructors purposely didn't help you the way they could have or maybe someone at the school sabotaged your exam. I'm not saying any of that happened, but they are well within the realm of possibility.

When someone comes here with straight up facts about their experiences we normally can trust what they're saying. They don't have an agenda, they're not slamming everyone under the sun like a ranting lunatic, and they're not making all kinds of final judgments on everything they experienced as if they've lived this industry their whole lives. They're simply stating objective facts. So you can normally figure they didn't have an attitude problem and they're not the type to blow up every time they were presented with a situation they didn't agree with.

But when people come here injecting all kinds of negative personal judgments on everyone they came across and they're here trying to ruin reputations and place blame for their failures then they're obviously rather emotional, outspoken, and vengeful people. With people like that there's no way to know if they blew up at the wrong people at the wrong times causing their own demise or if they really were faced with difficult people and circumstances.

So unfortunately I don't know what to do with anything you're saying. You could be 100% right about that school being a catastrophe. But in my experience 95% of the time someone comes into this industry with a bad attitude and fails to do their research they wind up screwing everything up for themselves but never feel as if any of it is their fault.

At this point I'm thinking the school was doing a rather poor job of preparing their students for the exam in the first place but you came along with a terrible attitude and made a bad situation much worse for yourself. But I don't have a ton of information to go on. So there's always room to revise that theory.

I still don't hate you. I only started off, by stating what the other's have stated, and even said I wanted you to succeed. I even acknowledged your intelligence, and tenacity, but You are the one who attacked, me, because I said something that did not agree with your preconceived notions, and biases. I had written a very long, and I think constructive reply to your attack, but instead changed my mind, because it would not have made a difference. Was I right to say what I did? nope, and I apologize. Brett, and the other guys, basically said what I would have said. Do I still want you to succeed? yup.

Stay safe

Sorry if this counts as a necro'd response, but I just had to make an account to reply. The story my dad had at this school was hilarious.

By the way, I am in no way related to and or affiliated with Ryan. I am not trying to clear his name, just confirm some of what has been said about this school. My dad just recently attended this exact school, Western Pacific Truck School of Stockton, California. Now I'm sure none of us know Ryan's background, but here is a little background of my dad. He was in the marines for 8 years. He also worked in the same factory for 20 years, until it fell apart because of poor management. He knows how to put up with bull****, and just simply follow the orders given to make ends meat.

Almost everything Ryan was complaining about, I heard my dad speak about it.

My dad said you had to be aggressively demanding with these "mean" instructors, that literally called you drooling ****ing idiots. (although in spanish) He said if you didn't speak up, they would continue to walk over you treating you like ****. If you were brave enough to start a confrontation over each aspect of driving you did not understand, which is likely ALLOT for a new driver, you will learn. He said these instructors were the better ones, although extremely frustrating to deal with.

The instructors that were calmer? Well, it went something like this. You're grinding the gears" Wow, you're doing great!" You smash some cones? "You'll learn when you get a job! *smile face*" I imagined it was like congratulating a person with an extreme mental disability for attempting to put a square cube into the round hole. A generic comforting response, without a correction.

He said if you have driven a truck before, it'd be acceptable. All in all, he said it was okay, considering he too had a free ride. However, he said it would be very difficult to stomach if the schooling came out of his own pocket. With the schooling he was given, which wasn't all that much, he passed the written and failed the driven. The company insisted they would help him by getting him some more wheel time. This never happened, they would float his calls. Insist they called him, and say my dad was trying to get over on them. They would schedule an appointment to practice, No instructor or truck.

He ended up meeting a guy outside of DMV on one of the days WPTS shafted him for a scheduled appointment. The "shady" guy offered to teach him for $1000/3weeks. It sounded shady as all hell, but he now has a cdl. Also a local job offer that seems very promising. This was all after getting ignored by WPTS for almost 2 months.

I just found this post and my head hurts. I am no way a professional Driver, but went through CDL School AFTER Doing TONS Of Research. Every Minute I was NOT behind the wheel I was Watching and Learning from THE OTHERS...This guy has issues.

Gonna get to know the truck stops real well

No one will care to help you and trust me you will need it, especially in the beginning.

That should already be evident from the results so far. And this is the easy part! The schooling is nothing. Wait til you're in Downtown Chicago during Friday rush hour in a thunderstorm or trying to ease 78,000 pounds down an 11 mile long mountain grade in the Rockies in mid-January at night on snow-covered roads when you can only see 100 feet in front of you. Sure is gonna be nice to have someone there making sure you don't kill yourself, ya know?

Attitude is everything.

And you'll like this G-Town.......the other thing people don't realize is that truckers are at the mercy of everyone they come across. Everyone from four wheelers on the highway to traffic police, DOT officers, dispatchers, load planners, safety officers, shipping clerks, dock workers, waitresses and cooks, and fuel island attendants. Wait until Ryan gets out there and starts telling everyone just how stupid and incompetent he thinks they are. That dude is gonna sit around on his *ss doing nothing more often than a kangaroo without legs! He's gonna get traffic tickets, fail DOT inspections, sit in parking lots for hours waiting to load and unload, get his food spit on, get the fewest miles of anyone on his dispatcher's board, and get home late every single time.

I've seen it a million times. It's so predictable it's not even interesting anymore to wonder how things are going to turn out.

"I'm sorry, Ryan, but you're a complete mess." -Brett Aquila

made my day lol

I just found this post and my head hurts. I am no way a professional Driver, but went through CDL School AFTER Doing TONS Of Research. Every Minute I was NOT behind the wheel I was Watching and Learning from THE OTHERS...This guy has issues.

There have been worse...