UK Version of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal

In 2001, The Psychometrics Centre were asked to adapt the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (W-GCTA) for the UK business market.

Together with the Rust Advanced Numerical Reasoning Appraisal (RANRA)the Watson Glaser was administered to a sample of 1546 respondents representative of the usage group in the working population. Co-norming and close association of RANRA with the WGCTA has produced a seamless and demanding appraisal of both higher level numerical and verbal reasoning skills. The high ceiling on both of the measures make WGCTA and RANRA worked together an ideal platform when recruiting in the management market.

Careful, analytical reasoning is an important part of most management roles and is known to play an important part in many occupations. The WGCTA as been designed to measure some of these important abilities and provides an invaluable assessment strategy for personnel professional and recruitment specialists involved in the selection and training of managerial and other professional staff.

The Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal measures:

Drawing inferences: The ability to evaluate the validity of inferences drawn from a series of factual statements.
Recognising assumptions: The ability to identify unstated assumptions or presuppositions in a series of assertive statements
Argument evalutation: The ability to determine whether certain conclusions necessarily follow from the information in given statements or premises
Deductive reasoning: The ability to weigh evidence and deciding if generalisations or conclusions based on the given data are warranted
Logical interpretation: The ability to distinguish between arguments that are strong and relevant and those that are weak or irrelevant to a particular question at issue

The norms from the 1546 standardisatiion sample are used to transform the WGCTA raw scores into T-scores (mean of 50, standard deviation of 10). These T-scores should be used as the common metric in assessing all scores on the both Watson-Glaser and RANRA and on the combined test. Thus, enabling assessors to compare candidates within and across roles.

WGCTA and RANRA are tests of power rather than speed. Most people complete the Watson-Glaser within 50 minutes (approximately 10 minutes per sub-test), and complete RANRA within 30 minutes (approximately 15 minutes per sub-test). Test administrators should allow 1 hour and 30 minutes where Watson-Glaser and RANRA are administered together.

Both the Watson Glaser and RANRA are published byTalentLens.