Could the citizens pass the citizenship test?

Well, as many of you know, I’m finally up for American citizenship! I’ve been in the States since I was 9, so it only took, oh, 18 years to get this far. While I’ll surely miss my shiny little green card and my Canadian passport, I’ll be thrilled to finally be able to vote in elections.

I poked around online yesterday looking for the proper N400 form, and I ended up perusing some study materials and sample questions for the citizenship test.

I find this sort of thing pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.

The spelling is of course quite easy for a native English speaker such as myself. And if any of you born-and-raised Americans can’t ace the civics portion, I worry about you.

The sad truth–or shall I say, the sad speculation and educated guess–is that a lot of Americans wouldn’t do well on this test on the first try. How many is “a lot”? Well, that depends. Now that the questions asked are more open-ended than they used to be–with queries like “What does the Constitution do?” replacing old ones like “What is the Constitution?”–lots of news organizations are digging around to see how well various samplings of U.S. citizens perform. (Examples: Fox News; CNN–you can even try your hand at a few questions at MSNBC.)

Out of simple curiosity, I’d love to see all Americans taking the 2010 census also try their hands at the citizenship test. How well do you think our citizenry would perform on average? How well will you do if you take the MSNBC sample test?

Fair is fair: I got a 95% thanks to the question regarding which listed state was not part of the original 13 colonies.

NOTE: This MSNBC test is arguably easier than the actual U.S. citizenship test because candidates for naturalization are given questions in short-answer format as opposed to multiple choice. As such, I recommend you check out the official study materials and sample questions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Web site.

Addendum: I’ve received several messages and comments from people regarding why they think many Americans would fail the citizenship test on the first go. In summary, they point out that most of the voting public is well beyond the days of elementary and high school civics and therefore shouldn’t be expected to retain historical facts and dates that do not affect them on a daily basis.

While I don’t personally think every American needs to know the number of amendments to the Constitution off the top of his or her heard, I do think other questions on the test are very important: Which branch of government declares war? Who is one of the U.S. senators from your state? Who selects new justices for the U.S. Supreme Court and what powers does the court have?

I think that every single American registered to vote should be able to answer these questions correctly–no excuses.