When OCR published their Examiners’ Report for the 2006 session for A-level Critical Thinking, the grade distribution table made pretty grim reading. Just 10.75% of students earned A grades in 2006 (6.05% at AS), compared to 24.1% across all A-level subjects. The pass rate at A2 of 87.67% was also markedly lower than the 96.6% average. Although it is often thought of as a soft subject, national average results for Critical Thinking are significantly worse than those for perceived hard subjects.

This should not be taken to imply that Critical Thinking is harder than other subjects–there are other factors that at least partly explain the poor results–but it does suggest that the subject needs to be taken seriously. A good grade in Critical Thinking is not a gimme.

Many schools and colleges have learned this the hard way that Critical Thinking is not simply a test of common sense that able students can do well at without much preparation. They have put little into their Critical Thinking courses, and in return they have got the low exam results that they deserve.

The first factor that helps to explain the poor results is that many teaching institutions don’t invest the same time in Critical Thinking as they invest in other subjects. A typical A-level course will involve five hours of lesson per week. Critical Thinking tends to be taught in between one and two hours per week, and in many cases even less than that. Students taking a Critical Thinking exam will have had significantly less preparation than students taking exam in other subjects, and this is bound to affect results.

There is also the question of the expertise of teachers. Sadly, many Critical Thinking teachers specialise in other subjects, teaching Critical Thinking as an extra. This lack of expertise may well have an impact on the grades of the students, dragging down the national average results.

A further factor is the newness of the course. 2006 was the first year of a new specification for Critical Thinking. With the new specification came a new exam format, which made it more difficult for teachers to drill students for the exam, and a shortage of teaching resources. This doubtless had a negative impact on grades, but the situation should improve year on year.

Finally, in some institutions Critical Thinking has been made compulsory (in the same way that General Studies often is). This tends to mean that even students who have no motivation to do well in the subject sit the exam, with correspondingly poor results.

For these reasons, we cannot simply compare the results in Critical Thinking with the results in other subjects and take that as a measure of the difficulty of the courses. Clearly students cannot simply walk into a Critical Thinking exam with no preparation and do well, but the mere fact that Critical Thinking results are worse than in most other subjects does not imply that it is among the most difficult of courses.