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Free critical thinking test

Free critical thinking test online: 20 questions on assumptions, evidence, deduction, arguments and inference, with a reason for every answer. Shareable result.

FREE PRACTICE · NEW QUESTIONS EVERY ATTEMPT

Critical thinking test

Evaluate only the information given. Choose the strongest justified answer. Distinguish a necessary assumption from a useful extra fact. Twenty questions cover five thinking skills. This is original practice, not a Watson–Glaser assessment.

20 questions20 minutes60 in the bank
Choose your pace

Each attempt draws 20 of 60 questions, and a retake avoids the ones you have just seen. One point per correct answer, no penalty for guessing. Skip and return to questions; answers and explanations appear after you finish. Your progress stays on this page until you reload or leave.

What a critical thinking test measures

A critical thinking test checks whether you can reason from what is written rather than from what you already believe. Employers use it for roles where decisions rest on documents, data and other people’s arguments: law, consulting, finance, policy, research and management. The best-known version, the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, reports five skills, and this test uses the same five.

  • Assumptions: what must be true for an argument to work, even though it is never stated.
  • Evidence: whether a study, survey or comparison actually supports the claim built on it.
  • Deduction: what follows with certainty from a set of rules.
  • Arguments: which point for or against a proposal is strong, and which is merely loud.
  • Inference: how far a conclusion can go on the facts given, and no further.

How this free test works

  • 20 original questions in 20 minutes, four per skill, drawn per attempt from a bank of 60. A retake excludes the questions you saw last time.
  • Every question has one defensible answer and three that a careful reader can rule out from the text: a stronger claim than the evidence allows, a true statement that is beside the point, or a conclusion that reverses the rule.
  • Timed or untimed. Learn the question types without the clock, then rehearse the pace with it.
  • A reason for every answer after you finish, stating the exact step between evidence and conclusion that each wrong option skips.
  • A five-skill breakdown on your result, so you can see whether deduction or evidence is the weaker area.
  • An optional shareable result with a permanent link, preview image and an Add to LinkedIn profile button.

Sample critical thinking questions

Assumptions. “Offering a discount to customers who pay within ten days will improve our cash flow.” Which assumption is necessary? The argument only works if some customers who would otherwise pay later will pay within ten days to get the discount. It does not need every customer to take the discount, and it says nothing about total revenue.

Evidence. Patients who arrive at a hospital by ambulance have higher mortality than those who walk in. Before concluding that ambulance transport is harmful, the most important caution is that patients who arrive by ambulance are likely to be sicker on arrival. The two groups differ before the journey begins, and that alone can produce the difference.

Deduction. Every parcel over 20 kg is shipped by freight. Parcel M was shipped by courier. What follows? Only that parcel M weighs 20 kg or less. Its exact weight is unknown, and nothing suggests a labelling error.

How to improve your critical thinking score

  1. Underline the claim before you read the options. Most wrong answers are true statements about something other than the claim.
  2. For assumptions, use the denial test. If the assumption were false, would the argument collapse? If the argument survives, the statement was not necessary.
  3. For evidence, look for the missing comparison. Who was not in the sample, what happened to a similar group, and what else changed at the same time.
  4. For deduction, read “all”, “some”, “only” and “no” literally. “Some managers are engineers” does not tell you anything about most managers.
  5. For inference, stop at the facts. A memo that says an office exceeded its target by the largest margin says nothing about whose sales were highest.

Reading your result

Your percentage is the share of the 20 questions you answered correctly. The result guide explains the score ranges and what to practise for each of the five skills. A skill count of 1 out of 4 points to a habit worth checking, not to a fixed ability. This is unsupervised practice with original questions, so it is not a Watson Glaser score, a percentile or a certificate.

Watson Glaser is a trademark of Pearson Education. This test is independent and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Pearson.

Frequently asked questions

Is this critical thinking test free?
Yes. All 20 questions, the score, the five-skill breakdown, the reasoning behind every answer and a public result link are free. No account or email address is needed.
Is this a Watson Glaser practice test?
It covers the same five reasoning skills that the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal reports, with original questions in a shorter format. Watson Glaser is a trademark of Pearson, which is not affiliated with and has not endorsed this site.
Why does the test say to use only the information given?
Critical thinking tests measure whether you can separate what a passage states from what you happen to believe. A conclusion can be true in the world and still not follow from the passage, and the question asks about the passage.
Are the questions the same on a retake?
No. Each attempt draws four questions per skill from a bank of 60 and leaves out the ones you saw last time, so a second attempt tests reasoning rather than recall.
How long should I spend on each question?
The timed mode allows 20 minutes for 20 questions. Most people need under a minute for deduction and inference items and closer to two minutes for arguments and evidence items, which need a second reading.