As roughly 11,000 people celebrated the Fourth of July this year by officially becoming U.S. citizens, The Washington Post challenged readers to test their knowledge of America with a civics quiz.
Aspiring U.S. citizens must a pass an oral exam of 10 civics questions chosen from a list of 100. The Post’s quiz featured 10 multiple choice questions based on the list of 100 questions that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provides as study material.
Test takers must answer six questions correctly to pass. More than 300,000 Post readers attempted the quiz. Here’s how they did.
(Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, now’s your chance to see how you stack up!)
Passing with flying colors
Overall, our readers knew their stuff. An overwhelming 90 percent of quiz-takers provided responses to all 10 questions and got at least six correct.
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While 97.1 percent of people who took the quiz in the U.S. passed, international quiz-takers fared pretty well too, with an 84.8 percent pass rate. D.C. readers performed above the national average, as 97.6 percent of people in the nation’s capital answered six or more questions correctly.
Post subscribers logged into their accounts performed better than quiz-takers who did not appear as subscribers to The Post, boasting both a higher average score and a lower failure rate. As of July 9, 97.1 percent of subscribers passed compared to 91.6 percent of nonsubscribers.
The questions that stuck
Quiz-takers were most likely to miss question No. 3 (“What is one responsibility that is only for U.S. citizens?”) and No. 8 (“When was the Constitution written?”) — the only two that more than 30 percent of people got wrong. The trickiest question proved to be No. 3: Just 60.5% of quiz-takers selected the correct answer, “Serve on a jury,” while 35.9% thought it was “All of the above,” which also encompassed “Pay taxes” and “Obey the law.”
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Quiz takers performed just slightly better when asked which year the Constitution was written. Only 63.6% knew the document was written in 1787, with 28% answering 1776.
Other questions, however, proved easy. For example, 96.1 percent of quiz takers knew the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are the two longest in the country. In addition to principles of American democracy and American history, geography is one of the categories covered in the civics exam.
In the real world
Just as participants scored well on The Post’s quiz, the overwhelming majority of aspiring U.S. citizens pass the naturalization test.
The two-part test includes both a section testing English language proficiency and the civics exam. In the 2023 fiscal year, which spanned from October 2022 to September 2023, more than 89.5% of naturalization candidates passed their first of two permitted attempts and another 5.8% passed during their retake, meaning 95.3% of candidates earned citizenship. In total, 878,500 naturalizations were approved.
A naturalized citizen’s perspective
One hundred people from 57 different nations gathered at George Washington’s Mount Vernon on the Fourth of July to swear their oath of allegiance and officially become American citizens. For Maria Becerra, 32, the moment was seven years in the making.
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Becerra’s family immigrated to the United States from Bolivia in 2001 when she was 8, but she began wholeheartedly pursuing citizenship seven years ago when she and her American husband learned they were expecting a baby. Her first try at the test this year — which she said she attempted without preparation — did not go so well.
A USCIS officer asked her 10 civics questions over Zoom. She felt she knew the material but, nervous about the impromptu citizenship test, said she made small mix-ups such as saying the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1767 instead of 1776. She failed.
“I was devastated,” Becerra said.
Mistakes like these are why Becerra said The Post’s multiple choice quiz is easier than the real exam, which is verbal. If she had a list of options to chose from, Becerra said she felt confident she could have passed the civics exam the first time.
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Two months later, in March, Becerra retook the test — this time having studied. If she failed the exam again, USCIS would deny her naturalization application. She answered the first six questions correctly, completing her last step in the process of becoming an American citizen. She said she remembers walking back to the waiting room to tell her husband and bursting into tears of relief.
“I came here when I was 8; I was already considering myself part of the country,” Becerra said. “But I was crying because I finally got to call myself an American.”
Sitting in front of George Washington’s home on America’s Independence Day, Becerra said she thought about generations of her family’s past and present. She thought of her two sons, ages 5 and 7, who had not understood why their mother wasn’t an American like them. She looked over at her dad, who came to support her and is preparing to take the civics test himself.
“They made the ultimate sacrifice of leaving family and their home for us,” Becerra said. “It’s so important to me that he got to be there to see that his sacrifice paid off.”
