How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test: By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself

>Why does the flag have 13 stripes? The official answer: "because there were 13 original colonies." In fact, the flag has 13 stripes for the 13 original states.

Maybe I misunderstand the point, but Delaware was the first state to be granted statehood in 1787, a full 10 years after the "Betsy Ross" flag with 13 stripes was in use. If you're going to write a super-pedantic article, you should be super-accurate too.

There's a famous story, possibly apocryphal, about Kurt Gödel going to his citizenship exam accompanied by Einstein and another friend.

The story goes that he had studied the Constitution and come to the conclusion that it was flawed, and contained a loophole that would allow the President to become a dictator (given the role the Weimar Constitution played in Hitler rise to power, this would not have been an altogether silly concern). He wanted to explain that the to the judge who was examining him, but he was finally convinced by his friends that it wouldn't be a good idea.

When I took my test, most of the people in the waiting room were struggling with basic English. They tested my ability to write English by asking me to write the phrase, "The US flag has 50 stripes", but I got it wrong because I wrote "fifty" instead of using Arabic numerals, and they awkwardly discussed whether or not to tell me my mistake and ask me to redo it, or fail me. They tested my ability to read by showing me three similar sentences, reading one aloud, and having me point at the one they had read. The test questions and answers are published online for the same types of people who might be challenged by these questions: people who haven't patiently gone through the whole process. None of it really assesses your ability to communicate in America or participate in the democratic process.

This article feels like picking at the unlikelihood of the legal situation in Dr. Doolittle. "Animals have been talking this whole time..." -- Josh Sneed.

I've taken numerous (1 EPA, 2 FCC, 16 USCG) government administered tests and they are all have these poorly written, blatantly wrong answers. Fortunately, with larger question pools and more questions on a test it doesn't throw your final score off if you get one or two where the wrong answer. I wouldn't want to take a test with 100 question pool and only 10 questions.

I expected this to be something more abstract so the concrete examples of factual inaccuracies were interesting.

My dad claims to have answered that the US was a financial oligarchy when asked what type of government the US had on his citizenship test but I suspect that was a joke.

"a tremendous honor" -- wait, what?

Why should becoming a citizen of a country be "an honour"?

(Especially when the country in question is the US; it fits the "US americans are superior humans" theme just right, even when realistically it doesn't seem to be something to be proud of... but that's besides the point.)

The questions accepting both the correct answer and the slighly incorrect answer I can understand. The "rule of law"-question, however, seemed more serious. I really wonder how things like that come to be.