Florida Immigrant Test Revised

It will probably not come as a surprise to anyone living and working in the Sarasota bradenton area that Florida welcomes a substantial number of immigrants every year. For that reason, the state of Florida has been involved in a 10-city pilot program of a new immigration test.

In addition to Miami FL, the pilot cities included Albany, NY; Boston MA; Tucson, AZ; Denver, CO; Charleston, SC; Kansas City, MO; El Paso and San Antonio, TX; and Yakima, WA.

According to a recent Palm Beach Post article, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services decided to revise the immigration test a year ago but the new test was not implemented until now to give English as a Second Language schools, immigrant advocate groups, and other adult education facilities time to develop new training materials to prepare immigrants for the new test.

Many previous test questions were replaced with questions designed to test the prospective citizen's knowledge of the basic civic concepts essential to being an American rather than just ability to do rote memorization of facts.

Starting out with 142 questions, the pilot program reduced the final number of quetions to 100 by removing or revising questions that showed higher than normal failure rates or which did not include basic historical and civic concepts.

Several of the new questions ask for more meaningful answers than the previous test. For example, the old test asked "what country did we fight during the Revolutionary War." The new test changes the question to, "why did the colonists fight the British." Some other questions were made simpler. Previously, immigrants were required to name both Senators from their state whereas now they only need to identify one of their state's senators.

The way the new testing process works is as follows: immigrants study to learn the answers to all 100 questions. But when they actually take their test, they are required to answer orally only ten questions getting at least six of them correct. In addition, they now have to read a sentence in English and write a sentence given to them.