The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently completed a multi-year redesign of the naturalization test. The major goal of the redesign process is to ensure that naturalization applicants have uniform, consistent testing experiences nationwide, and to provide a fair and meaningful naturalization process. The USCIS believes that the newly designed test will help encourage citizenship applicants to learn and identify with the basic values we all share as Americans.
To accomplish their goals, USCIS piloted a new test with an overhauled English reading and writing section, as well as new history and government questions in several sites across the country. The feedback from the pilot program was used to finalize testing procedures, reading and writing prompts and new history and government questions. While it sounds as if the changes are drastic they are pretty slight with only the format of the questions asking now about US History as opposed to daily living.
Naturalization applicants will begin taking the redesigned test on October 1, 2008.
