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Posted Sunday 29th April 2012 at 4.24pm
It's all a mystery
I was talking to a friend yesterday who mentioned that the UK citizenship test is pretty tough. I had no idea what it involved - I remember someone important many years ago joking that anyone who wanted UK citizenship should be able to name the England cricket captain - so my friend asked me a sample question: "when did women get the vote in the UK?" I was able to rattle off the correct answer, 1918.
This morning I tried the practice test here... and got 11/24. OK, so I didn't really think through my answers (I finished in about 4 minutes whereas 45 are allowed), and I did no preparation for the test, but I like to think I'm a reasonably intelligent UK citizen with at least a passing interest in politics, and I failed horribly.
Question 1: In the 1980s, the largest immigrant groups were from the West Indies, Ireland, India and Pakistan.
A) True
B) False
I know that these four groups probably make up some of the largest immigrant groups in the UK; I have no idea whether this was the trend in the 1980s in particular though. I presume immigration from Ireland has been commonplace for a long time, and I'm pretty sure there was a fair amount of immigration from the West Indies as far back as the late 1940s. Immigration from the subcontinent might be a more recent phenomenon. But if you were born in 1983, for example, like me, how are you supposed to know the answer? In fact even knowing the question, I think it would take a fair amount of work to find out the answer. I guessed true, but I don't know if I was right or not.
Question 2: Which TWO of these are names for the Church of England?
A) Methodist
B) Episcopal
C) Anglican
D) Presbyterian
I wasn't sure, but I went methodist and anglican. I've now looked the four of them up on wikipedia and I still don't know the correct answer. Methodist isn't a name for the Church of England - I knew that before I first did the test - but it is a name for a branch of the Church of England. The others seem to be more US-based (so I guess I got the question right) but in their wikipedia pages the word "Anglican" is featured prominently. In summary this is a poor question.
Question 3: How many parliamentary constituencies are there?
A) 464
B) 564
C) 646
D) 664
I guessed 664, because there were three answers ending in 64 and two involving the digits 4,6,6. The answer is 650, although it was 646 in 2005 (it'll change again soon). So the structure of the answers is deliberately misleading and all of the answers are wrong.
Question 4: Which of these statements is correct?
A) Education at state schools in the UK is free and this includes the cost of school uniform and sports wear.
B) Education at state schools in the UK is free but parents have to pay for school uniform and sports wear.
I knew the answer to this one (it's B), because I remember the boredom of going to buy school uniform. But what relevance does it have to UK life? If you're sending your kids to school, you're told by the school what you have to do about uniform. If you don't have kids then who gives a firetruck? There's no need to know this information.
I could, of course, go on. So it turns out that the question about women getting the vote was actually much more reasonable than most of this practice test. At least there's a reason to remember the date (it was the end of the first world war) and it has some importance to the history and culture of the UK, even if it's not really relevant to everyday life.
Tell us the story, Wayne...
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Comments
Posted Sunday 29th April 2012 at 8.22pm
Rich says:
15/24! Although my Cross of St George sleeping bag was already proof that I'm a much more loyal citizen than you...
Obviously I agree with you in every way that matters. It's a stupid test, although I don't think the UK is unique in this regard.
But I am interested in what you've said about the parliamentary constituencies question.
Obviously the biggest problem is that none of the four answers is correct. I'm guessing that's probably because no-one's bothered to update the practice test in seven years (I hope that's it).
But do you really think it's unfair that the wrong answers they chose means you meta-reasoned your way to the wrong answer? Okay, it's stupid that the test is designed to test dumb fact retention; but given that it IS designed to test that, I'd have thought that the fact you can't use other methods to get to the answer was a mark of good design.
(Incidentally, if you click "Test Summary" at the end it tells you what they thought the right answers were.)
Posted Sunday 29th April 2012 at 8.29pm
Matt Roberts says:
Yes, I think it's unfair that the wrong answers they chose meant I meta-reasoned my way to the wrong answer. They are deliberately trying to get me to choose the wrong answer. If the answers were 446, 546, 646, 746, then I would say it's actually a reasonable question - you only need to know vaguely how many seats there are, which perhaps could be classed as relevant knowledge. (I'd probably still have got it wrong though!)
Whether it's unfair, though, is a different question from whether it's a well-designed test given that they want to test dumb fact retention. A test can be well-designed and unfair.
Thanks for the tip about the test summary!
Posted Sunday 29th April 2012 at 8.47pm
Matt Roberts says:
(However, the test isn't well-designed if dumb fact retention is their sole aim: question 17 features four answers and asks me to choose the two correct ones, but one of the answers implies the other three, so can be ruled out logically.)
Posted Tuesday 1st May 2012 at 6.38pm
Melina says:
13/24 - but I took 7 minutes. Am I more British than you?;-) Pretty stupid questions - from their construction and their content ... I noticed the problem with question 17 and got it right by ruling some answers out - I had no idea Irish people can vote here if they live here. But I have lived here for nearly 9 years and it has neither affected my life here and nor has me not knowing it affected other peoples life (I think). Questions on British values (freedom of speech, equality of people, justice, freedom of press, religion etc), language and maybe a bit of history and politics would be much more useful/appropriate. I guess there is a question catalogue which people have to learn by heart .. I am so glad I am European!
Posted Tuesday 1st May 2012 at 7.32pm
Matt Roberts says:
Yes, exactly, there seems to be a book that you have to learn off by heart. I guess this ensures that you can speak English and are willing to put some effort in, but not much else.
Congratulations on being more British than me! But still not British enough to pass...
Posted Friday 4th May 2012 at 8.14am
Melina says:
And here
http://www.deutsch-werden.de/
is the German citizen test - so you can check if you are more German than me;-) There seems to be a catalogue of 300 questions - 33 are chosen randomly and 17 have to be answered correctly. I got 32/33.
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