Don’t panic! These words, memorably printed on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, should also be etched on the purple booklet that introduces the skills tests for new teachers.

Panicked by news of students failing to gain QTS after buckling under the pressure of mindless computer probing, every man, woman and graduate approached our tests with terror.

Our trepidation seemed well founded as we tried to book them. Each of us had a registration number to log on to the Teacher Training Agency website, but few of us realised that logging on doesn’t end with your seven-digit number.

Oh no, you’ve got to provide an email address, date and place of birth, training provider, gender, ethnic group, type of training course, area of specialism, when you expect to be recommended for the award of QTS, whether English is your first language, whether special arrangements are needed within the test, and whether you’d like an alarm call and your eggs runny or hard.

OK, I made the last two up. But, assuming the TTA had a vague idea of who we were before deciding to issue us with a personalised registration number, that seems 10 steps more than is necessary.

A day after registering, you receive an email with a user name and password. This allows you to go back to the same website to book a test. Douglas Adams would have had trouble dreaming up anything more absurd. The cynical among us reckon that having got through this process we had automatically passed our ICT skills test. We were wrong.

Literacy is simple, providing you can stay awake while reading the tedious passage provided in the comprehension test. Don’t worry if your spelling is poor. In one mock test I missed out a section and still passed. Which brings us to the really scary one - numeracy.

With unlimited sittings allowed, anyone should pass, eventually - providing that, contrary to The Hitchhiker’s Guide, you remember that the answer isn’t always 42.

David Ogle is a PGCE student at Bath Spa University College