Undergraduate critical thinking courses are supposed to improve skills in critical thinking and to
foster the dispositions (i.e. behavioural tendencies) of an ideal critical thinker. Students taking such
courses already have these skills and dispositions to some extent, and their manifestation does not
require specialized technical knowledge. Hence it is not obvious that a critical thinking course
actually does what it is supposed to do. In this respect, critical thinking courses differ from courses
with a specialized subject-matter not previously known to the students, e.g. organic chemistry or
ancient Greek philosophy or eastern European politics. In those courses performance on a final
examination can be taken as a good measure of how much a student has learned in the course. In a
critical thinking course, on the other hand, a good final exam will not be a test of such specialized
subject-matter as the construction of a Venn diagram for a categorical syllogism or the difference
between a reportive and a stipulative definition, but will ask students to analyze and evaluate, in a
way that the uninitiated will understand, arguments and other presentations of the sort they will
encounter in everyday life and in academic or professional contexts. Performance on such a final
examination may thus reflect the student’s skills at the start of the course rather than anything
learned in the course. If there is improvement, it may be due generally to a semester of engagement
in undergraduate courses rather than specifically to instruction in the critical thinking course. There
may even be a deterioration in performance from what the student would have shown at the
beginning of the course.