The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal is one of the most widely used standardized tests for measuring critical thinking ability, and if you’ve been asked to take it, you’re almost certainly applying for a job at a law firm, consultancy, bank, or graduate program that considers analytical reasoning a core skill. First developed in the 1930s and revised multiple times since, the test evaluates how well you can draw inferences, recognize assumptions, make deductions, interpret information, and evaluate arguments. It remains a fixture in professional hiring despite decades of debate about what it actually measures and whether it captures something meaningfully different from general intelligence.
What the Test Measures
The Watson-Glaser is built around five categories of thinking, each tested through its own type of question. In the inference section, you read a passage and decide whether a proposed conclusion is definitely true, probably true, uncertain, probably false, or definitely false based solely on the information given. The recognition-of-assumptions section asks you to identify unstated assumptions buried in a statement. Deduction questions present premises and ask whether a conclusion logically follows. Interpretation questions give you a passage and ask you to evaluate whether certain conclusions are justified by the evidence. And the evaluation-of-arguments section presents a question or issue alongside reasons for and against, asking you to judge whether each argument is strong or weak.
What ties all five sections together is a demand that you set aside what you personally believe or know and focus only on the logic of the passage in front of you. That sounds straightforward, but it creates one of the test’s most interesting tensions, which we’ll get to shortly.
Versions and Format
The test has been through several iterations. The original Forms A and B, published in 1980, contained 80 items and took roughly 55 minutes. A Short Form released in 1994 pulled 40 items entirely from Form A and cut the time to about 35 minutes. The more recent Forms D and E, introduced in 2009, also have 40 items drawn partly from Forms A and B, respectively, with a similar time frame.1Informal Logic. Critique of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test: The More You Know, the Lower Your Score The Watson-Glaser II, the most commercially current edition, further updated the language and scenarios to feel more modern and workplace-relevant.
If you encounter the test in a hiring process today, you’re almost certainly taking the 40-item version. It’s usually administered online, often unsupervised, and the time pressure is real: 30 to 35 minutes for 40 questions means less than a minute per item. Some employers follow up with a supervised re-test if your score is unexpectedly different in person, so performing authentically on the initial sitting matters.
Where You’ll Encounter It
The Watson-Glaser has two main homes: professional recruitment and higher education. In hiring, it’s especially common in the legal industry. Many large law firms in the UK and elsewhere use it as a first-round screening tool, often before a candidate even reaches an interview. Consulting firms, investment banks, and some government agencies also use it, typically alongside verbal and numerical reasoning tests. The logic is that critical thinking, as measured by the Watson-Glaser, predicts how well a candidate will handle ambiguous, evidence-heavy problems under time pressure.
In education, the test has a long history in nursing and medical programs. A study of nursing students at the University of Hawaii found that Watson-Glaser scores at entry were related to both GPA and performance on the national licensing exam (NCLEX), with GPA serving as the strongest predictor of licensure by effectively summing up the effects of critical thinking and pre-admission test performance.2PubMed. Critical thinking and nursing education This kind of finding has kept the test embedded in health professions education, where clinical reasoning is considered essential.
Critical Thinking Versus Raw Intelligence
One of the persistent questions about the Watson-Glaser is whether it’s really measuring critical thinking or just intelligence under a different name. The two are clearly related: people who score well on IQ-type tests tend to score well on the Watson-Glaser too. But research suggests the test picks up something that goes beyond cognitive horsepower alone.
A study of undergraduate students found that scores on the Watson-Glaser were predicted not only by verbal cognitive ability (measured using Wechsler intelligence subtests) but also by the personality trait of Openness to Experience, even after verbal ability was accounted for. In a follow-up with a second group of students, the same pattern held: Openness to Experience contributed meaningful additional predictive power beyond what the Verbal Comprehension Index already captured.3PubMed. Personality traits and critical thinking skills in college students: empirical tests of a two-factor theory In practical terms, this means two people with similar verbal reasoning ability can score differently on the Watson-Glaser based on how intellectually curious and open-minded they are.
This finding matters for anyone preparing for the test. You can’t easily change your baseline cognitive ability in a few weeks, but you can practice the habit of genuinely considering conclusions you’d normally dismiss. The test rewards people who can temporarily suspend their own perspective, and that disposition seems partly separable from how “smart” someone is in the traditional sense.
Can You Train for It?
The short answer is: sort of, but probably less than you’d hope. A classic management development study tried to boost critical thinking through a structured training program and found no significant improvement on the assessment tools used. The researchers noted that the entire program lasted only 20 hours and suggested it would have been unrealistic to expect meaningful gains in that time.4Personnel Psychology. Evaluation of a Management Development Program
That doesn’t mean preparation is useless. There’s an important difference between improving your underlying critical thinking ability and improving your score on a specific test format. Familiarizing yourself with the Watson-Glaser’s question types, understanding what each section is asking you to do, and practicing the discipline of sticking to the information given in the passage can all make a noticeable difference. The test has specific rules about what counts as a valid inference or a strong argument, and knowing those rules matters. Someone who has never seen the test before will almost certainly perform worse than someone who has practiced with sample questions, even if both are equally sharp thinkers.
What’s harder to change quickly is the deeper skill the test is trying to tap: the ability to evaluate evidence fairly, spot hidden assumptions, and resist the pull of your own beliefs when the logic points elsewhere. That kind of thinking improves with sustained practice over months or years, not with a weekend cram session.
The Background Knowledge Problem
One of the most interesting critiques of the Watson-Glaser is that knowing more about a topic can actually hurt your score. The test asks you to evaluate arguments and draw conclusions based only on the information given in each passage. But if you happen to know a lot about the subject of a particular passage, your real-world knowledge can conflict with the narrow information the test provides, and you might choose an answer that’s correct in reality but wrong according to the test’s rules.
A paper titled “The More You Know, the Lower Your Score” examined this dynamic in detail, arguing that the test penalizes test-takers who bring legitimate outside knowledge to bear on the passages.5Informal Logic. Critique of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test: The More You Know, the Lower Your Score This is a genuine design tension. In real professional life, integrating what you know with new evidence is a hallmark of good reasoning. On the Watson-Glaser, it can get you marked wrong.
This is probably the single most important thing to understand if you’re about to sit the test. You have to treat every passage as a self-contained world. If a passage says “all lawyers work long hours” and asks you to evaluate a conclusion based on that premise, you need to accept the premise at face value even if you know plenty of lawyers who work reasonable schedules. The test is assessing whether you can follow a chain of logic, not whether you know things about the world.
The Belief Bias Complication
Related to the background knowledge problem but distinct from it is the issue of belief bias: the tendency to judge an argument as logically valid when you agree with its conclusion, or invalid when you disagree. Researchers have investigated how belief bias interacts with critical thinking test performance, administering the Watson-Glaser alongside measures specifically designed to capture belief bias and epistemological assumptions.6ERIC. Critical Thinking, Belief Bias, Epistemological Assumptions, and the Minnesota Test of Critical Thinking
The practical takeaway is that the Watson-Glaser’s passages are sometimes designed around topics where you might have strong opinions. Political statements, social policy claims, and moral assertions show up in the test precisely because they’re the contexts where belief bias is most likely to interfere with logical reasoning. Recognizing this pattern helps. When you hit a passage that triggers an emotional reaction, that’s exactly when you need to slow down and focus purely on the stated premises and the logical structure of the question.
How It Stacks Up Against Other Critical Thinking Tests
The Watson-Glaser is far from the only critical thinking test on the market, and researchers have long compared it with alternatives. The California Critical Thinking Tests (the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory) are commonly used in academic settings. A study comparing psychometric properties across these tests found that some critical thinking instruments lacked sufficient reliability for assessing individual abilities, particularly the Test of Scientific Thinking, which was evaluated alongside the Watson-Glaser.7PubMed Central. Psychometric properties of the California Critical Thinking Tests
Other alternatives include the Cornell Critical Thinking Test and the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Examination. The Watson-Glaser’s advantage in hiring contexts is largely practical: it’s multiple-choice, can be scored automatically, has decades of normative data, and takes under 40 minutes. Essay-based assessments may capture richer reasoning but are slower and harder to score consistently, which makes them less attractive for employers screening hundreds of applicants.
For test-takers, the most relevant difference is format. The Watson-Glaser’s multiple-choice structure means you can sometimes eliminate obviously wrong answers even when you’re unsure about the right one. Tests that require you to write out your reasoning, like the Ennis-Weir, leave less room for that strategy. If you know which test you’ll be taking, practicing with the right format matters more than practicing generic “critical thinking exercises.”
What Scores Actually Mean
Watson-Glaser scores are typically reported as a raw score and a percentile rank. The percentile compares you against a normative group, which varies depending on the version of the test and the norms the employer is using. Some firms use general adult norms, others use graduate-level norms, and a few use norms specific to their industry. This means a score at the 70th percentile against one norm group could look very different against another.
Most employers using the Watson-Glaser set a cutoff percentile rather than looking for the highest possible score. A common threshold in the legal industry is around the 60th to 75th percentile, though this varies by firm and role. Scoring above the cutoff gets you to the next stage of the process; scoring far above it doesn’t usually grant extra credit. This is worth keeping in mind when allocating preparation time. If you’re a strong reader and reasonably analytical, the test may not be the bottleneck in your application. If you consistently struggle with the format in practice tests, targeted preparation is worth the investment.
One wrinkle: because many firms administer the test online and unsupervised, there’s an integrity concern. Some candidates use extra time, reference materials, or even collaboration. This is why some employers require a supervised verification test at a later stage. If your unsupervised score and your supervised score are dramatically different, the lower score is what counts, and the discrepancy itself raises red flags.
Practical Strategies for Test Day
Knowing the test’s structure and quirks translates into a handful of concrete strategies that go beyond “practice more.”
- Accept the passage’s world: Treat every passage as if it describes reality, even if you know the facts are wrong or oversimplified. Your job is logic, not fact-checking.
- Watch for assumption questions: These trip up even strong test-takers. An assumption is something the statement takes for granted without saying it. If the statement could still make sense without the assumption, it probably isn’t a necessary assumption.
- Be strict about “strong” vs. “weak” arguments: In the evaluation section, a strong argument is both relevant to the question and important. An argument can be true and still weak if it’s tangential to the actual issue.
- Don’t overthink deductions: The deduction section is the most purely logical part of the test. If the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, it follows. If there’s any scenario where the premises are true and the conclusion is false, it doesn’t follow.
- Manage time actively: With roughly 45 to 50 seconds per question on the 40-item form, you can’t afford to deliberate on any single item for more than a minute. Flag uncertain answers and return to them if time allows.
Cross-Cultural Adaptations and Language Concerns
The Watson-Glaser was developed in English for an American audience, and its international use has raised legitimate questions about fairness. The test is heavily verbal. Reading speed, comprehension of nuanced English phrasing, and familiarity with Western argumentation conventions all affect performance. Researchers have worked on adapting the test for other languages and cultural contexts, including Turkish and Arabic versions, though the psychometric quality of these adaptations varies.
For non-native English speakers taking the English version, the language demands are a genuine hurdle. The test’s passages use formal, sometimes dense prose, and subtle differences in wording can change whether an answer is correct. If English is your second language, the most productive preparation strategy is reading argumentative English prose (editorials, legal opinions, policy analyses) rather than drilling generic vocabulary. The challenge isn’t knowing the words but parsing the precise logical relationships between clauses at speed.
Even for native English speakers from different cultural backgrounds, some passages may describe scenarios or institutions that are unfamiliar, which can slow processing time or introduce confusion. The newer test editions have tried to address this with more universally recognizable scenarios, but the concern hasn’t fully disappeared. If you encounter a passage about an unfamiliar topic, remember that the test isn’t testing your knowledge of the topic. Focus on the logical structure, and treat the unfamiliar details as neutral facts.