I'll be taking the citizen test next month but it will be the old one.
The citizenship test: New, improved and wrong
Only some of the answers on the government's new test are flat-out incorrect, but many are misleading to would-be students of the Constitution.
By Steven Lubet
Jan. 3, 2007 | With much fanfare, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service recently announced the introduction of a redesigned naturalization test. Trumpeted as a great improvement over the old examination, the new format will "focus on the concepts of democracy and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship." Some critics and immigrants' rights advocates have complained that the new citizenship test is too demanding, asking questions that nearly all Americans, whether native born or naturalized, would be hard-pressed to answer. But the degree of difficulty is not the only problem.
The pilot test and the approved answers (as posted on the USCIS Web site) are riddled with misinformation, inaccuracies and outright errors. As many as 19 of the 144 questions are flawed. They either are woefully ambiguous, or accept simplistic answers that are factually wrong, or exclude answers that are clearly correct. While none of the individual mistakes is earthshaking, the wrong answers will mislead earnest citizenship applicants who use the pilot test as a study guide. It will distort the constitutional understanding of thousands of would-be Americans, and actually penalize those who are the most serious students of the Constitution.
[snip...]
Only U.S. citizens may apply for federal jobs (seriously wrong, especially given the context; permanent resident aliens -- meaning pretty much everybody who takes the citizenship test -- are eligible for employment by many agencies of the federal government, including the U.S. Postal Service).
"Inalienable rights" are "individual rights that people are born with" (wrong; inalienable rights are those that cannot be denied by government; they may or may not arise at birth; and some rights at birth are, in fact, alienable).
Everyone has the right to bear arms. (This is basically wrong, and probably ideologically motivated; the Second Amendment makes it clear that the right to bear arms is connected to a "well regulated militia," and the Supreme Court has held that this right does not belong to individuals -- and in any event, it is an "alienable" right, as in the case of convicted felons.)
And so on. There are half a dozen more like these, ranging from the subtly misleading to cringe-worthy. Although only one-eighth of the 144 pilot questions have imprecise or erroneous answers, the threat to hard-studying immigrants is palpable.
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