On Nov. 30th, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the release of 144 questions, including 80 that are new or reworded, for its proposed new naturalization exam. To test the new questions, the USCIS announced that it would be administering pilot exams “to about 5,000 volunteer citizenship applicants in 10 cities beginning in early 2007 … To pass, applicants will have to correctly answer six of 10 selected questions.”
Noting that many of the new questions are ambiguous or seem irrelevant to the issue of someone’s fitness for citizenship, People For the American Way Foundation created its own naturalization tests by randomly selecting ten of the questions from the new list and then quizzed pedestrians at City Hall Park in New York to see how they fared.
The result? Of the 246 U.S. citizens surveyed, 50.41% (124) failed and 49.59% (122) passed.
PFAWF has now put its randomly generated quiz on-line – take it and see how you do.
