According to reports from the Canadian World Journal, the difficulty of the Canadian citizenship test has increased, and the passing standard has been raised, leading to a sharp rise in failure rates. According to news released on November 30, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has instructed officials to make adjustments to ensure that the pass rate for the citizenship test reaches 85%.
In a media interview, Immigration Minister Kenney stated that immigration officials are making further adjustments to the citizenship test to ensure the pass rate reaches the expected 85%. The new version of the citizenship test is based on the significantly revised citizenship guide "Discover Canada," which adds considerable content regarding Canadian history and institutional systems. The English in the test questions is more difficult, and the passing score has been raised from the previous 60% to 75%.
Kenney emphasized that one of the main objectives of the new citizenship test is to ensure that citizenship applicants possess basic proficiency in Canada's official languages, English and French. The two previous adjustments made by the Immigration Department to the citizenship test did not address the issue of language difficulty. The Immigration Department first showed leniency by allowing those who failed the written citizenship test to retake it, rather than only having the option of an interview with a citizenship judge. Subsequently, during another adjustment in October, the long-standing requirement to correctly answer certain mandatory questions was abolished.
Kenney also revealed that the new test will maintain the practice of frequently shuffling the order of questions, so that the sequence of questions is different for every test. He pointed out that for the 20 multiple-choice questions in the test, the old version of the exam was fixed into five groups, and the order of each group and each question remained unchanged for a long time, which led to some candidates cheating. Examinees could purchase leaked test papers from immigration service providers and other sources, memorize the options for the answers in order, and pass the test through trickery.
