Testing your own Critical

Thinking skills!

To discover how you measure up to Sumner’s ideal, try out

the test in this section. After all, tests and Critical Thinking

skills seem to go hand in hand, like fish and chips, or maybe

Dracula and garlic.

I looked at lots of these tests in order to prepare this one, but

I should straight away confide to you that I think most of the

standard tests are nonsense. No kidding, really I do.

The questions conventionally used to measure Critical

Thinking skills range widely across a lot of areas — verbal

skills, visual skills and of course number skills — but I doubt

whether they measure anything that deserves to be called

Critical Thinking. More important than that, plenty of recent

research indicates that such tests are poor indicators of how

anyone may do in any real‐world job or situation. The tests

only seem to show how good you are at doing, well, tests!

Nonetheless, lots of people do think such skills are terribly

relevant and important, and they certainly tell you something,

even if its only how well you’d do in a Critical Thinking skills

paper. Naturally, a true Critical Thinker will always try new

things and be quite happy to tackle tests like this both in the

spirit of fun and to discover something about their own think-

ing patterns and preferences. So here’s one to try. The time

allowed for the ten questions is 30 minutes. You can find the

answers at the end of this chapter — but don’t cheat!