Joe Rodriguez
By Joe Rodriguez
Citizen’s Corner
Joe Rodriguez is a resident of San Benito, a local citizen watchdog, and a former candidate for the San Benito City Commission.
Starting in October 2025, green card holders seeking U.S. citizenship will face a new, more comprehensive version of the oral naturalization test.
The new 2025 Naturalization Civic Test has increased from 100 to 128 questions. Applicants will be asked 20 randomly selected questions instead of 10. To pass, applicants will need to answer 12 of them correctly instead of six as in the old test.
As with the previous test version, it is an oral exam administered by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer. However, unlike the last test, once an applicant answers enough questions to pass or fail, the Immigration Services officer can stop asking questions.
Only immigrants “who meet all eligibility requirements, including the ability to read, write, and speak English and understand U.S. government and civics, can apply for naturalization.
The focus of the new 2025 version will mainly be on American history and governance.
Unlike the actual citizenship test, which may have more than one correct answer for some questions, I have created a 20-question multiple-choice test with only one correct answer per question. These are actual questions from the new 2025 oral naturalization test.
If you want to test your American History and Governance civics knowledge, visit JFRODRIGUEZUSA.BLOGSPOT.COM or https://tinyurl.com/2025citizenshiptest and see how you do!
Footnote: I failed the test!
For background and guidance, the following was written by Joseph B. Edlow, Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Naturalization Test
Consistent with the above authority and delegation, USCIS is responsible for assessing an alien’s civics knowledge through testing.
As discussed previously, USCIS’s authority to administer the civics test also extends to developing and revising the test, as USCIS deems appropriate and necessary.
The civics test has been administered in some form since the early 1900s. As early as 1908, the former Immigration Service and the Courts held that a person could not meet the naturalization requirement of showing an attachment to the Constitution unless he or she had some understanding of its provisions.
However, without a standard test, local judges or magistrates administered their own test.
In the 1930s, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under INS Commissioner D.W.
MacCormack made reforming naturalization testing a major initiative under his tenure.
Commissioner MacCormack issued instructions to create a definite and uniform procedure for examining aliens for citizenship and stressed that the examinations were meant to demonstrate the attachment to the principles of the Constitution rather than memorization of facts, and that the examination be uniform, fair, and devoid of “trick questions.”
The Nationality Act of 1940 expanded the agency’s authority to test naturalization candidates’ knowledge of the Constitution and the U.S. Government.
The Internal Security Act of 1950 established the modern educational requirements for naturalization by amending the Nationality Act of 1940 to require knowledge of U.S. history and civics for naturalization.
These amendments were carried forward essentially without change into the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) when it was enacted in 1952.
INS policy in 1950 maintained the civics test as primarily an oral quiz, with the degree of questioning determined by the alien’s education, background, and interactions with the examiner.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) mandated that aliens legalized under INA 245A meet basic citizenship skills.
Aliens who qualified under IRCA could choose to demonstrate their understanding of U.S. history and government by taking a course prescribed in IRCA. For all other aliens, including those aliens who qualified under IRCA who chose not to take a prescribed course, INS developed the “100 civics questions,” based on content from the Federal Textbooks on Citizenship.
In years past, the standardization and meaningfulness of the naturalization test came under scrutiny for several reasons, including the lack of standard content, instruments, protocols, or scoring rubrics.
In response, the INS began a revision process in 1997 and published an updated naturalization test in 2000 that standardized test questions; however, INS did not at that time standardize the manner in which the test was administered.
Since then, USCIS has actively worked to continue standardizing the naturalization civics test and to ensure the test is transparent. USCIS revised the test in 2008 and then again on December 1, 2020.
USCIS rescinded the December 1, 2020 revisions on February 22, 2021, when USCIS announced it was reverting to the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test beginning on March 1, 2021.
The 2020 Naturalization Civics Test
In 2018, after closely examining the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test, USCIS determined that the test could be improved and initiated a revision process. The revision included an expansion of the bank of testing questions, rewording/revising of questions, and adding questions to ensure adequate familiarity with American history and principles and form of U.S. government. These revisions culminated in the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test.
The 2020 Naturalization Civics Test fulfills the statutory requirement that an alien must demonstrate “a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States” as required under sec. 312 of the INA and further outlined in 8 CFR part 312.
The 2020 Naturalization Civics Test increased the general bank of civics test questions from 100 to 128, the number of test questions for the exam to 20 (from 10), and the number of correct answers needed to pass the civics test to 12 (from 6). Officers asked all 20 questions, and the alien had to answer 12 questions correctly.
The test was administered by an officer who asked the alien questions from a computer-generated list of 20 questions selected randomly at prescribed levels of difficulty from the bank of 128 questions.
With the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test, USCIS aimed to standardize the administration of the Naturalization Civics Test and ensure that the test provided a meaningful assessment of an alien’s knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government, and that it was uniform and fair for all aliens applying for naturalization.
Although the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test increased the number of questions in the question bank from 100 to 128, approximately 75 percent of the content came from the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test.
This included some questions that were taken verbatim from the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test, as well as content that was revised or recontextualized. Some questions from the 2008 version of the civics test no longer appeared in the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test and approximately 25 percent of the test constituted new content.
Before full implementation, USCIS conducted a pilot of the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test in the summer of 2020.
The pilot test reviewed the effectiveness and difficulty level of some of the questions with volunteers. USCIS recruited community-based organizations (CBOs) that offered adult citizenship education courses to lawful permanent residents preparing for the naturalization test as volunteers to participate in the pilot test.
USCIS then worked with the CBOs to help identify students who would volunteer to take the pilot test. The pilot test was administered remotely to students who volunteered to participate in the pilot test.
USCIS asked participants the civics test questions orally and then captured their answers on a digital testing platform. The pilot test was originally intended to be administered in-person, but due to restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, it was converted to a virtual pilot test. Based on the data and results from the pilot test, USCIS edited questions and answer choices, and identified the 20 questions from which to select 10 questions for the aliens over the age of 65 who had at least 20 years of residence as lawful permanent residents (LPRs).
The pilot helped USCIS determine the language and grammatical structure of individual test items and assign linguistic and cognitive weights to each test item.
The 2025 Naturalization Civics Test
On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order (E.O.) 14161, Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.
The E.O. directs the Secretary to “[e]valuate the adequacy of programs designed to ensure the proper assimilation of lawful immigrants into the United States, and recommend any additional measures to be taken that promote a unified American identity and attachment to the Constitution, laws, and founding principles of the United States.”
Consistent with this directive, USCIS is reimplementing the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test with some modifications (discussed in this section) (“2025 Naturalization Civics Test”) as a measure to promote a unified American identity and attachment to the Constitution, laws, and founding principles of the United States.
For the reasons discussed previously, USCIS believes that the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test made essential improvements, and thus better fulfills the statutory requirement that an alien must demonstrate “a knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States” as required under INA sec. 312 and further outlined in 8 CFR part 312.
The 2020 Naturalization Civics Test was announced on November 13, 2020, and was administered from December 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021, including to aliens whose naturalization applications were already pending as of the date of implementation. After a change in administration, USCIS gradually reverted to the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test. USCIS announced the reversion on February 22, 2021.
The reversion to the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test was based on a preliminary “determination that the 2020 civics test development process, content, testing procedures, and implementation schedule may inadvertently create potential barriers to the naturalization process [and that the reversion was] consistent with the framework of the Executive Order on Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems.”
This prior determination was not supported by data or other evidence that the revised 2020 Naturalization Civics Test had or would create such barriers, and the revised test was in place for too short a time for USCIS to gather sufficient data from its administration to be able to make a reasonable assessment of possible impacts.
USCIS believes that the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test development process and the pilot test made critical updates to the accuracy and relevance of the civics test. USCIS also believes that the changes in the test and process ensured that the administration of the test is standardized, methodical, and fair.
USCIS believes that the 2020 Naturalization Civics test better ascertains the understanding and knowledge necessary to qualify for naturalization than the 2008 Naturalization Civics test.
In addition, USCIS believes that the publication of this notice in the Federal Register, the advance publication of study materials (as discussed in the next section), along with the implementation schedule based on the date on which a naturalization application is filed, will provide the public, and specifically aliens applying for naturalization, sufficient time to adapt to the new test, while also preserving the reliance interests of aliens who may have already prepared for the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test.
USCIS also believes that these implementation improvements will address the underlying concerns that led to the reversion to the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test.
As discussed previously, when USCIS initially implemented the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test, USCIS administered a 20-question test of which the alien had to answer 12 test questions correctly. This was a change from the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test where USCIS administered a 10-question test of which the alien had to answer six questions correctly.
In implementing the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test, USCIS will resume administering 20-question tests using the same bank of 128 questions and answers that it used for the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test.
USCIS believed and continues to believe that administering a 20-question test is necessary to more comprehensively assess an alien’s knowledge of U.S. history and government by ensuring that each test covers a broader set of topics.
USCIS, however, is making a modification in the administration of the test. When USCIS initially implemented the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test, officers were required to orally ask all 20 test questions regardless of whether the alien had already answered a sufficient number to either pass or fail the test.
This was a change from the 2008 Naturalization Civics Test where the officers were only required to orally ask questions until the alien either passed or failed the test. In implementing the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test, officers will only be required to ask questions until the alien either passes or fails the test.
This is the only difference from the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test. Therefore, when an alien answers 12 questions correctly, the officer will stop administering the test. Similarly, when an alien answers nine questions incorrectly thus failing the test, the officer will stop administering the test.
The implementation of the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test, as discussed in this notice, is a procedural change and will not change the passing score.
These changes balance the need of USCIS to ascertain the aliens’ knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of American history, and of the principles and form of government of the United States with the time available for each interview, and take into account feedback USCIS received in response to the initial implementation of the 2020 Naturalization Civics Test.
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