Skip to content
Menu

Changes to this site

This is the record of what has changed in the content of CivicsWise: the explanations, the guides, the state answers and the practice test. Each entry says what changed and why.

Dates are the day the change was made to the site's content, which can be a few days before it reached the live site. Changes to design, layout or performance that do not alter what you read are not listed. How the content is produced and tested is described on the methodology page.

Two new guides

The 50/20 and 55/15 exemptions used to be a paragraph inside the 65/20 guide. They are a different rule, about the English test rather than the civics list, so the exemptions guide now covers them on their own, together with the medical exception on Form N-648. The guide to the two versions answers the question that comes before any studying: which list applies to you, based on the day you filed Form N-400.

How the site is made

The methodology page describes where the questions, the accepted answers and the explanations come from, how an explanation is written and cited, which automated tests are run before a change is published, and how to report a mistake.

Study pages that explain the category

The three study pages were a short description followed by the list of questions. Each one now says what the category covers, which of its answers are fixed and which depend on your state or on who holds an office, and gives a tip for every group of questions. Start with American Government. The question index also opens with which list is yours and how the officer asks the questions.

A worked example on the practice test

The practice test page walks through two made-up tests to show the early stop: one that passes before the last question and one that ends as soon as passing is out of reach. It also explains what the 65/20 version asks of you and the ways this practice differs from the interview.

The practice test says when a question asks for more than one answer

Some official questions ask you to name two, three or five things. In multiple choice, an option can show only one answer, so a student could pick the right option and still learn to give one answer where the officer expects several. The 12 questions that ask for more than one answer now say how many the officer wants, both while you answer and in the summary at the end.

The practice test also keeps an attempt in progress if the page reloads, can be limited to a single topic, and breaks the result down by topic so you can see where to study next.

New guides

The guide to answers that change exists because the official list gives no name for those answers and sends you to another USCIS page. The election guide explains which answers can change after the federal election and when the change takes effect, so nobody walks into an interview with an answer that was correct a month earlier.

Two data pages from government figures

Naturalization statistics and N-400 applications by field office present published government figures with the year or quarter each one belongs to. They answer questions that come up around the interview, such as how many people naturalize each year, which the question pages cannot.

Every question page lists its sources

Until this date, the citations behind each explanation were stored and tested but not shown. Each question page now has a Sources section that groups its citations by document, with the section and printed page, and a link that opens a PDF at that page. Each page also links up to three other questions on the same topic.

The first guides

The guides section opened with three guides written for this site, the first pages whose value does not depend on the official question list:

Officeholder questions leave the multiple-choice practice

Questions that ask who holds an office now (4 in the current list) used to have wrong options like any other question, which meant listing real people as incorrect answers, and those names go out of date with elections and appointments. These questions now have no wrong options and are not drawn in the multiple-choice practice. Their pages still give the current answer, and the guide to answers that change explains where it comes from.

The 2008 test

People who filed Form N-400 before the current test took effect still take the 2008 version, with 100 questions. The 2008 test section opened with its own practice test and index. 62 of its questions have a page and an explanation of their own. The other 38 are worded exactly like a question in the 128-question list, so the index links to that page instead of publishing the same question twice.

The 65/20 practice mode

Applicants who are 65 or older with 20 years as permanent residents study a shorter list. The practice test gained a mode that draws 10 questions only from that list and passes at 6 correct answers.

A home page

The site got its real home page, which sends you to the practice test, the question index and the study sections.

The practice test

The practice test opened with the rules of the current version: 20 questions, 12 correct answers to pass, and an early stop at 12 correct or 9 incorrect, which is what the officer does. Questions that depend on your state are left out, because they have no single answer to grade.

First version

The first version of the content: the 128 official questions and answers of the current test, taken from the USCIS PDF, each with an explanation of its own and at least one citation. Every question has one page in the question index, and the three official categories each got a study page. The names of current officeholders were kept in a single data file from the start, so that no explanation would go out of date after an election.

Report a problem

If something on the site is wrong or out of date, write through the contact page. Say which question or page it is and what you think it should say.