Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

I&#x27;ve taught college. This study is wildly unsurprising. I&#x27;ve written about this in various places (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;27&#x2F;paying-for-the-party-eliz...</a>), but most colleges have evolved majors and paths that are designed to move students through the system, collect their tuition money, and graduate them.<p>In re-reading the previous sentence, I think I sound opposed to this. I am a little bit, maybe, but mostly I&#x27;m opposed to the way no one explicitly tells this to students. A lot of the brighter or better prepared ones figure it out, but many, it seems, never do.

I teach community college biology, and I agree that we&#x27;re really bad at teaching critical thinking. But the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) cited by this article was graded by a computer last time I checked. Here&#x27;s a direct quote from one of their papers a few years ago:<p>&quot;Beginning in fall 2010, we moved to automated scoring exclusively, using Pearson’s Intelligent Essay Assess or (IEA). IEA is the automated scoring engine developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies to evaluate the meaning of text, not just writing mechanics. Pearson has trained IEA for the CLA using real CLA responses and scores to ensure its consistency with scores generated by human raters.&quot;<p>Link below: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pdf-archive.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;06&#x2F;cla&#x2F;cla.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pdf-archive.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;06&#x2F;cla&#x2F;cla.pdf</a><p>Most of you are more knowledgeable about technology than I am. So I&#x27;ll leave it to you to decide if using an algorithm to grade an essay-based exam of critical thinking is a valid approach to this problem.

Why wait for college to teach critical thinking skills? My father is a prof at a major university and we grew up discussing ideas, but high schools can teach critical thinking skills and problem solving. My high school was owned by the university and we did a lot of critical thinking.<p>Jewish religious schools (Yeshivas) teach critical thinking skills by studying the Talmud [1]. A number of Yeshiva students take the LSATs and skip college altogether to go directly to law school so powerful is the process of learning Talmud.<p>Basically Talmud is full of (often) legal arguments and stories and a lot of time is spent on thinking through&#x2F;arguing edge conditions (e.g., a piece of property is found overlapping public space and private space).<p>The point is that college is absolutely not necessary to teach critical thinking skills and in my opinion this should be started at a much younger age.<p>Incidentally, I have found even graduates of Ivy League schools seem to not understand basic fundamentals. For example, in Economics, they don&#x27;t seem to understand why housing is so expensive in certain cities and don&#x27;t seem to have the analytical skills to understand why prices are high.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talmud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talmud</a>

Every time a college sucks article gets published I think the same things:<p>Look at the college enrollment rates since the 1960&#x27;s. Look at the tuition rates since the 1960&#x27;s Look at the distribution of majors since the 1960&#x27;s<p>Then precede to look at the labor market. It all becomes very clear. There&#x27;s millions of great young people roaming the halls of colleges who are not engaged in higher learning. Great young people who would develop critical thinking skills from work, family and good on the job training.<p>Many of these young people are told from an early age that college is a must in order to get anywhere. Whether that&#x27;s true, I can&#x27;t answer with confidence. I waited to go to college. After high school I decided to work, pay bills and taxes. In my late 20&#x27;s I went back for a CS degree and am productive and happy now. Had I gone right out of high school I would have wasted a lot of time and money.<p>Is there even a solution to this issue outside of the family? Is the focus and quality of k-12 in the wrong place? Is it a mixture? Who knows?

The problem isn&#x27;t critical thinking skills. You can get together any 5 jokers and ask them &#x27;what&#x27;s the best way to build a backyard patio?&#x27;, and they&#x27;ll all start stroking their chins. But when thinking critically interferes with some sort of strong emotion, or pre-conceived belief system, then forget it. It doesn&#x27;t matter how much education you have, if entertaining a particular problem causes your amygdala to start firing then your ability to think critically is out the window.

Critical thinking is an important skill but I&#x27;d like to caution against this fixation on critical thinking thought in collage as some sort of beacon for society.<p>Critical thinking is something people develop over the years and it starts early IMO. It&#x27;s not just a 4 year course. It&#x27;s a whole approach to the world around you. There are many critical thinkers in my experience outside of collage. And I don&#x27;t see it a problem as such.<p>Also it doesn&#x27;t matter how good a critical thinker you are we all have blind spots and biases that makes it impossible to be critical thinkers in all contexts. Will need to look at the study to see how it&#x27;s actually measuring the critical thinking skills.<p>Many of those who do learn critical thinking first when they get to college end up getting such a aha moment that they think critical thinking is the same as constructive thinking and should be applied to everything.<p>You often meet them in the big companies or management. Many of them like to play the devils advocate poking holes in everything around them but aren&#x27;t able to come up with solutions themselves.<p>In my view critical thinking is best learned by reading philosophy and seeing how philosophers historically either improved or created new theories. Because here critical thinking and constructive thinking goes hand in hand. If you read the right progression of philosophers through time you end up understanding how they didn&#x27;t just critique but put forward their theories which could then be critiqued.<p>In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking.

The thing that most struck me after signing up for a few college courses this past semester for the first time is how little emphasis there is on actually <i>learning</i> the material. Especially in math classes. The entire focus is on passing a test. It seems like the entire system is just set up as a means of &quot;testing&quot; whether you already know enough to pass a given course, rather than the focus being on learning and developing new skills.

I remember the moment I unlocked the critical thinking I do have.<p>It was 7th grade, and I was in a home-ec-like class. The day before we had learned how to order from mail order catalogues (showing my age there). This day the teacher passed out magazines, told us to pick an ad, and then find 5 ways it was misleading.<p>Easy, right? Sex, money, Fame, these associations are in a bunch of ads, and everyone knows about them. But it turns out that 5 is a pretty high number for some ads. You had to really look. And even that didn&#x27;t change anything for me.<p>Then we presented to others. And one girl showed an ad for Bayer, and said &quot;4 out of 5 doctors recommend. Who picked the 5 doctors?&quot;.<p>My mind was blown. I think it was the moment where I considered myself a good judge and then was shown a point I had never even considered. I had thought all about having careful wording on the survey, not mentioning any negative results, but I had never considered that the very basis of it could be manipulated to the point of meaninglessness.<p>I think that moment of fundamental distrust, in both what I&#x27;m being told, as well as in my own certainty, did the trick.<p>Perhaps too well - I&#x27;m hypersensitive to being manipulated. I rejected any career that involved deliberate group manipulation, such as military, law enforcement, and legal. I recognize that EVERYTHING is manipulative to some degree and can&#x27;t be avoided, but I try to avoid anything that does it very explicitly, so I can&#x27;t for example, watch most documentaries. The moment the vocal pacing and background music starts something in my brains starts shouting &quot;YOU ARE BEING MANIPULATED!&quot; and I try to fight that manipulation, which is largely impossible so I generally end up turning it off. Ditto political speeches (I&#x27;ll skim the transcripts, thanks), most anything out of marketing, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t really think we can &quot;teach&quot; critical thinking, but we can provide opportunity for it again and again. I think our school system in the US (no experience elsewhere) is very poorly set up to do that, be it college or pre-college.

&gt; Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve...<p>The irony of this sentence is painful. The entire reason most colleges fail to improve reasoning - something everyone has known for a while now - is because of standardization and industry-oriented training. They&#x27;ve transformed into advanced trade schools, caring more about selling products (graduates) than producing well-rounded, capable leaders. The entire idea of a standardized test is to produce the very metrics they use to sell those products.<p>And you know what the worst part about it all is? They are using the old college model (4-year baccalaureate programs) to do what could be done just as effectively in about two years. So they aren&#x27;t even good at what they are TRYING to do.

I went to MIT, and I&#x27;m pretty sure everyone already had critical thinking skills. In fact, I just assumed that&#x27;s part of what the admissions office was looking for.<p>&gt; at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table<p>Is this what defines critical thinking? Because if these are the skills they want to teach, they should just explicitly teach them. Philosophy taught me a bit about arguments, but it wasn&#x27;t writing class. In writing class we wrote, but they didn&#x27;t teach structured arguments.<p>Personally, I loved solving logic puzzles as a kid, and I&#x27;d read. Also my mother raised me to think carefully and objectively. I don&#x27;t ever remember being taught &quot;critical thinking&quot; at school though - not in college or anywhere else. I&#x27;m not aware of any workplace that teaches it either.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s why we&#x27;re screwed!?

I&#x27;ve always wondered if going to college immediately at 18 is the wisest of choices. Personally I worked numerous jobs until 30 and earned my bachelors in history and political economy. I always appreciated each class and all that was offered while everyone else around me being way younger were recovering from the night of partying before. I know how I was at 18, I was tired of high school and ready to just explore the world. I did and when I went to college it was on my own dime and when it felt right.<p>Granted what was learned would be considered soft, nothing that could really show in the coding world.. and I get it.. you go to get technical skills to get a good job. To me though if this is what college is about then perhaps we should aim for more of an apprenticeship type set up like Germany. Liberal arts colleges can exist still, but it&#x27;ll be to teach for a more mature crowd able to pay out of pocket and not being something made almost as a requirement. That&#x27;s not to say you need a college degree to succeed.. I was already set up in my career at the time without any college experience. Considering now I&#x27;m trying to start an aquaculture company I probably should of majored in marine biology... then again.. I really didn&#x27;t become passionate about over-fishing until I took a political course on it. Shrug.

Critical thinking skills are not taught because they teach you how to question authority, and that means criticizing parents, teachers and the system.<p>Socrates already tried doing that and was accused of corrupting youth (and got him condemned to death)

Many comments here are about the value of higher ed generally and are fascinating to read, but I&#x27;m interested in critical reasoning particularly, and this study doesn&#x27;t surprise me.<p>(1) Critical reasoning is rarely taught directly, especially to students who don&#x27;t major in or take a philosophy course.<p>(2) Even when critical reasoning is taught directly, it&#x27;s poorly taught. Compare an introductory text on critical reasoning from fifty years ago with one today. You will find that the former feels like it&#x27;s written for a user of reasoning (which is as it should be written) and the latter is written for explainers of reasoning (colleagues or future academics, I guess?). Jargony, technical, prolix, etc.<p>(3) Too many professors in the humanities are influenced by a conception of argumentation-as-narrative rather than argumentation-as-truthseeking, or deny there&#x27;s a distinction or that the latter is possible. Quality of indirect&#x2F;incidental critical reasoning education is not what it used to be.<p>(4) STEM education overemphasizes formal logic. Most of our daily reasoning that&#x27;s worthy of being called &quot;logic&quot; is informal logic.<p>Outside of university is more important, but things don&#x27;t look great there either, for reasons everyone here is already familiar with. Echo chambers. Loss of nuance as deliberation is framed in terms that can easily be liked&#x2F;hearted&#x2F;shared&#x2F;retweeted. Curious what, if anything, folks here think could be done to turn things around.<p>[Edited for clarity.]

The article is about college but what about the previous 12 years of school. Why don&#x27;t students learn critical thinking during those years. 12 years of school and students lack learning skills, critical thinking skills and what burns me most high school graduates don&#x27;t have a marketable skill they can use to get a job if they have to start working.<p>Last year&#x27;s election focus on some very irrelevant subjects yet our graduates aren&#x27;t ready for the world they have to face. School reform should be a hot subject yet it&#x27;s not at the top of the list. Start up jockeys take note the US school system is ready for disruption. I hope it happens soon.

The mandatory Jordan Peterson link:<p>&quot;Why You Go To College&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ANtPUg37f04" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ANtPUg37f04</a>

If people had critical thinking skills they wouldn&#x27;t be taking out outrageous loans to pay for often worthless degrees.

I went to Boston University for undergrad. When I went, tuition and board were 46k, which I thought was absurd. Fast forward a decade and it&#x27;s 70k. At this rate, in less than 10 years it will be 100k per year. How does any of this make sense?!?!?!?

Not the biggest fan of higher ed, but why put this on the colleges? Why not the high schools? Eighteen was practically middle-aged in the 19th century. We just keep dropping that bar and infantilizing people so much that WSJ will be writing this about PhD programs in a few more years.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Free_education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Free_education</a><p>&gt; Thomas Jefferson proposed &quot;establishing free schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and from these schools those of intellectual ability, regardless of background or economic status, would receive a college education paid for by the state.&quot;<p>&gt; In the United States, the first free public institution of higher education, the Free Academy of the City of New York (today the City College of New York), was founded in 1847 with the aim of providing free education to the urban poor, immigrants and their children. Its graduates went on to receive 10 Nobel Prizes, more than at any other public university.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ccny.cuny.edu&#x2F;about&#x2F;history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ccny.cuny.edu&#x2F;about&#x2F;history</a><p>&gt; City&#x27;s academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles &quot;Harvard of the Proletariat,&quot; &quot;the poor man&#x27;s Harvard,&quot; and &quot;Harvard-on-the-Hudson.&quot; Ten CCNY graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes.

Link to get past paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jposhaughnessy&#x2F;status&#x2F;871799072956534784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jposhaughnessy&#x2F;status&#x2F;871799072956534784</a>

Why should we believe that their critical thinking evaluation is accurate?

It took me a long time to really develop critical thinking skills. I&#x27;m still behind where I think I want to be. One thing I&#x27;ve noticed is spending more time on the right sites, like HN, has helped tremendously. Even if they aren&#x27;t perfect. Another thing that has really helped is spending more time with critical thinking friends.<p>So what really makes the top colleges so great. Is it really just the professors and curriculum or is the real value in that more bright minds are all grouped together.

It isn&#x27;t just that people aren&#x27;t taught thinking skills, it&#x27;s that people are actively attacked and coerced into suppressing that kind of thinking style. Going through normal public schooling systems most people are taught during key developmental phases that questioning the world around you causes punishment. If it isn&#x27;t your parents, it&#x27;s your teachers or the government constantly shoving stupid thought-suppressing ideas in your head. During these phases your immune system learns to associate free thinking with abuse and pain. When you are an adult it becomes very difficult to undo this. An adult who gets very emotional when their beliefs are questioned likely got abuse and punishment when they questioned the beliefs of those around them in youth.

If I&#x27;d used my critical thinking skills to go to an HVAC vocational track, following years of hourly &#x2F; labor Summer jobs as a teenager, and took out a business loan half of what I&#x27;ve spent on University studies, I&#x27;d probably have a small empire by now.<p>Universities are great for a liberal arts study track, but that&#x27;s kind of it. I&#x27;m not even sure most require Students to study Retirement Planning or &quot;How to Understand a Car Loan&quot; in practical terms.

For a lot of people, college is a phase where you have to suspend critical thinking and go with the flow.

Not having read TFA due to paywall I&#x27;ve noticed that a hell of a lot of people deriding critical thinking really mean something like: &quot;So many people disagree with me about the environment&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;religion&#x2F;liberty&#x2F;whatever and I just <i>know</i> they&#x27;re wrong so they must be unable to think critically.&quot;<p>They, them, over there. There are whole courses run on &quot;Why other people are so unfathomably wrong.&quot; [1]<p>Maybe the TFA says so, but maybe we should actually look at our own thinking. What facts we&#x27;d actually not bet on yet find it ok to use as opinion foundations. How many ways could we be wrong in what we think. It doesn&#x27;t seem to be popular (or I&#x27;m missing the point, am not up to date with the zeitgeist, or thinking is totally overrated anyway or ...)<p>[1] one example. Maybe it&#x27;s excellent, for all I know. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;making-sense-climate-science-denial-uqx-denial101x-4#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edx.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;making-sense-climate-science-deni...</a>!

I&#x27;m working on critical thinking with my 2 year old. If he can&#x27;t think critically by college then I&#x27;ve failed.<p>I spend time each day practicing discussing things with him and he has already come to assume if he wants anything in life he will need to talk about it as throwing a fit or whining ensures he does not get anything.<p>People assume because kids haven&#x27;t been trained, they can&#x27;t be trained. So they wait until they are older (or even at college level) to begin training. Really bad idea.

Is it possible a large portion of the observed behavior of critical thinking personality based (ie Jung Theory)?<p>That is to say could it be certain personalities are more likely to analyze. They may not be smarter or even more educated but are more drawn to problem solving and analysis than others.<p>So even if the individuals were taught to perhaps be more logical, detail oriented, not reactive, etc it maybe incredibly unnatural such that a normal psych test may not elicit the behavior.... just a theory... I&#x27;m probably wrong.<p>While it seems critical thinking is a good thing it might be in some cases detrimental particularly if it requires more time. That is reactive individuals who prefer not to rely on critical thinking might be able to make critical decisions quicker (albeit possibly incorrect).

The problem is that most students now go to school just to get a degree, a certification of sorts. They don&#x27;t want to think and they&#x27;re very resistant to any teaching that not &quot;on the test.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s more, college students have come to view their college enrollment as a commercial exchange where they expect to get &quot;what they paid for.&quot; Unfortunately, for them, that&#x27;s not critical thinking skills, but a &quot;good&quot; piece of paper that can get them a job.<p>Critical thinking can&#x27;t be quantified or measured on a multiple-choice test, and is therefore becoming highly unpopular with students in even the best universities

Critical thinking topples popular, mainstream, insecure systems and that&#x27;s not good. You want obedience and the lazy, traditional education systems ensure they put out order-following, capable workforce, not adaptive, ever-changing ones.

Higher ed needs competition.<p>In the interest of human progress, justice, and fairness, top-tier education needs to become open-access and in the form of competitive study.<p>Instead of the greatest academic achievement having anything to do with money, connections or committees, make degrees open access: anyone can study for them and test for them.<p>If any person, no matter how disadvantaged, or from what community they come from, wants to study pre-med, then they should be able to self study and test for a bio, chem or other pre-med degree.<p>There&#x27;s no technological or economic reason this can&#x27;t happen.

I don&#x27;t think I was forced to develop critical thinking in a systematic way until my PhD, where I actually had to produce ideas that would withstand scrutiny by both professional scientists and experiments. I went to a magnet high school and then a liberal arts college and the emphasis seemed largely on preparing for tests at both places. It is probably true that I could have developed my thinking more at an earlier stage if I had been more self-motivated. Needless to say, the PhD was a painful experience.

Lots of reasons for this.<p>Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it&#x27;d be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don&#x27;t think most faculty come close to being solid critical thinkers.<p>Whereas most beliefs are life-long emotional self-indulgence parties (my tribe good! their tribe bad!) critical thinking is a life-long struggle against your own lazy and thoughtless mind. It&#x27;s very low-entropy so it takes intense, endless, focused effort to maintain, especially in a group.<p>--<p>Another big impediment is that teaching critical thinking would go directly against many professors&#x27; big goal, which is to spread whatever memeplex controls their mind, because they think that&#x27;s the biggest moral command for an educator. Higher education is now a political orthodoxy. Free-thinking, questioning of accepted ideas, and consideration of &quot;dangerous&quot; ideas are now often considered not just factually incorrect but morally incorrect. e.g. In the social sciences, professors lean the same direction politically in a ratio of 15 to 1 now. Students who speak or write against the orthodoxy become the victim of outgroup psychology and are punished socially, academically, and professionally.<p>People notice when the purity spiral goes totally insane like at Evergreen recently, but this is a universal phenomenon at this point. The quiet damage of self-censorship is constant and massive, and destroys critical thinking education not just by ignoring critical thinking, but by actively teaching students wrong critical thinking and tricking them into believing it is critical thinking. They&#x27;d be better served with a pile of books and an anonymous Internet forum.<p>There is some pushback from organizations like Heterodox Academy [1] but it remains scattered and ineffectual. Until the academy re-embraces freedom of speech, diversity of viewpoints, it&#x27;ll continue to be a moralizing seminary school and thus will continue to teach to moral conclusions instead of teaching thinking methods.<p>--<p>And the final reason that seems obvious is that most of the people in university these days just shouldn&#x27;t be there. They&#x27;re not mentally prepared for higher education; they don&#x27;t have the IQ. It&#x27;s like sending a blind person to a school of visual arts. But they&#x27;re sent there because it sounds good in politics, provides false hope that everyone can become high status (the Lake Woebegone dream), and provides for the endless expansion of a very lucrative government-money-milking educational establishment through subsidized tuition.<p>Education is in a sad state and a growing number of people think the model has to collapse and be replaced by a more decentralized model aided by technology (e.g. YouTube lectures, etc).<p>[1] heterodoxacademy.org

Side note: Should we allow WSJ articles as that they prevent the reader from reading the entire article for free? At this moment it seems like it&#x27;s an avenue to advertise for WSJ.

I&#x27;m not sure this is a reasonable expectation of college. Critical thinking is hard to teach. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s possible to scale it beyond the few teachers who are good at it.<p>Measuring critical thinking is hard, too. The universities who criticized the test used here are probably not wrong, even if their motive is only to save face. It&#x27;s only 90 minutes, which is a time limit more suited for quick sophistry than looking at some new evidence and coming up with a solid argument from it.

Sadly, nobody is pointing out how critical thinking is under constant attack in some western societies.<p>In a society based on entertainment and consumerism, emotions, desires and impulsive behaviors are [made] king. Nobody will try to sell you a car or some shoes by appealing to your rational side.<p>Analytical and level-headed people, e.g. academics, mathematicians, engineers are frequently depicted as uninteresting and boring in movies.

90% of college &quot;critical thinking&quot; will result in same conclusion. 9% will change their conclusions to match with the majority. 1% will be shamed.

Interesting, and not entirely surprising.<p>I just finished Godin&#x27;s altMBA two weeks ago, and it&#x27;s all about critical thinking. This was a struggle for a lot of the students as they were either use to or expecting a typical college style instructional design.<p>The whole program was incredible and my mind is still spinning. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;altmba.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;altmba.com&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s almost as if relentless standardized test taking doesn&#x27;t generate critical thinking skills? Wow who woulda thunk! If only we could critically think, maybe we could think critically about this.

i have several questions here:<p>- how does one measure critical thinking in a survey? The article doesn&#x27;t say so.<p>- The humanities&#x2F;liberal arts are supposed to encourage critical thinking, how do the Humanities compare vs exact sciences&#x2F;engineering in terms of critical thinking?<p>- Do employers really value critical thinking, or does too much critical thinking inhibit your career prospects in an organisation?

Asking WHY is a taboo in modern education system :(

How do we know this test is not just a proxy test for motivation? Why would anyone try to do well on the test?

Well, I&#x27;m a product of this system, so I&#x27;m not sure what I&#x27;m missing out on.

Long thread and no one talks about just teaching Logic like French schools do.

critical thinking is very importen thing, student must have the ability (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aidatour.co.id" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aidatour.co.id</a>)

critical skill is importen, student must have the ability (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aidatour.co.id" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aidatour.co.id</a>)

However this article is revealing, it is not surprising at all.

Do what you&#x27;re sold^H^H^H^Htold.

I graduated college back when there were still a few summer jobs that earned enough to pay for the following 2 semesters of college. I was in the biological and chemistry sciences.<p>The CLA+ is the test discussed in the article which measures critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing. (thanks to jakob223 for the link) A sample &quot;spreadsheets and news articles&quot; example asked students to decide and backup your recommendation for a product campaign given numerous sources.<p>Looking back the biggest change in college was how fast I could absorb information and mentally outline a document&#x27;s contents to come back to it. Critical thinking and analytical reasoning came from my background in computers and an amazing high school instructor. Is being faster the same as improving a skill?<p>The example mentioned above focused on the ability to interpret charts, tables, and graphs and write a plan of action based on and backed up by the information. Being able to work with numbers and charts usually ties into one&#x27;s chosen area of study. Those who are not comfortable with numbers are not going to learn it in college because they&#x27;re going to avoid exposure to it as much as possible.<p>Certain majors put an emphasis on critical thinking skills. If the school or the selection of seniors to sit for this exam represented this group it would definitely skew the results.<p>Things (I think) I did right: Always take the majors intro course versus the general. It&#x27;s better taught, not everyone is clueless, and you&#x27;ll probably hate the subject less. Physics 213 E&amp;M test Average: 43% Range - 23%-63% &amp; an 84% &quot;outlier&quot; by me. Won&#x27;t ever forget that one!<p>I took a 300 level History of the Civil War rather than Western Civ. Criminal Justice and Differential equations even though I didn&#x27;t need either. There were a few others but it&#x27;s been too long. This was before prices exploded so taking a course out of curiosity wasn&#x27;t a major financial burden. I thought my Criminal Justice instructor in insufferable liberal at the time. Four years later in a completely different environment what he said was happening all around me day and night. Without it I would have no context and completely missed what was a prelude to current day Baltimore. I continuously learn more about the Civil War. One course and I&#x27;ve given tours to friends of Gettysburg, Antidem, Harper&#x27;s Ferry, and the Bloody Angle. Seeing why things were done a certain way after reading about it in a book is a treat. Seeing the bend in the Missouri River at Vicksburg was amazing! Look up Grant landing south of Vicksburg.<p>What would I suggest taking? Never stop asking &quot;Why?&quot; Philosophy involves questions and critical thought and discussion to a rational argument to an answer or at least something close to it. In a society of systems for stamps of certification or education asking why is increasingly infrequent. TBTAW &quot;Too Big to Ask(or Answer) Why?&quot; There&#x27;s an art to doing it so as to not offend or insult. Putting down the brush for a mallet does have a time and place. But it&#x27;s not just asking the question, it&#x27;s having a system to deduce an answer. When it comes to identifying stressors asking and then answering questions is part of the process. It&#x27;s part of a process.

Just yesterday there was a thread [1] on the rising costs of college and if it is worth it. The general consensus on that link seemed to be that most can no longer afford learning for the sake of learning.<p>Contrast that with this thread, where many appear to be taking the stance that college education, particularly one of breadth, is a crucial part of their education. Some posters have discussed the benefits of small liberal arts colleges.<p>As far as I can see, the anecdotes from many here about education is a big part of why the cost has been able to rise so much - it can give a life-changing value for some. HN is a community of programmers, mostly. Ask many about a CS degree, and they won&#x27;t tell you that the programming languages they learned in college are what makes them successful, but the way they learned to teach themselves as needed on topics in CS. Give a man a fish, yada yada yada. The same really goes for critical thinking and education in general. It&#x27;s the reason a few in the thread yesterday talked about their loans being worth it.<p>The hard part is getting a student to focus on learning to think&#x2F;learn, to borrow from a post by @closure in this thread. There seems to be a lot of support behind pushing for critical thinking and this type of learning in high school, which I strongly agree with. I was lucky enough to get it in high school, and early at that. It made an absolutely huge difference in my approach to education.<p>The question then arises: is it the responsibility of a college to teach a high-level of critical thinking, or should you enter with it? I don&#x27;t have the answer, but I&#x27;m curious as to what people think.<p>I go to (chose) a college that is very much pre-professional at the core, but it offers all of the resources I need for a full and fulfilling education. I have always seen college as a resource, but you have to know how to use it to get the most out of it. The problem is that most college freshman, and many college seniors, don&#x27;t know how to do this, and critical thinking is probably a big piece of that.<p>It&#x27;s a bit of a circular problem - you need critical thinking skills to get the most out of college, but may need to also learn critical thinking at college. If we ever actually get to a point where we can do a proper overhaul of the education system as a whole, I think properly defining and executing these roles should be a key focus.<p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>PS: This is just a collection of thoughts&#x2F;insights, not really a stance or an argument. Not sure what to make of all of this yet as a full picture.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14483409" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14483409</a>

I can&#x27;t bypass the paywall with Google. Any help?

See: the last election cycle<p>Also: As someone who does have critical-thinking skills (perhaps taught by my Cornell Psych major), it&#x27;s extremely disheartening to see bad thinking pretty much everywhere