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Something strange has happened in the hiring landscape over the last few years. Law firms, management consultancies, and graduate admissions offices — places that used to rely almost entirely on interviews and transcripts — have started putting candidates in front of structured reasoning batteries before they ever get to shake anyone's hand. The question they're asking is not simply 'what do you know?' but 'how do you think?'It's a shift that should interest philosophers more than most. And quietly, it already does.

The Rise of Reasoning Assessments

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, first developed in the 1920s and revised substantially since, has become one of the most widely deployed screening tools in professional and academic contexts. Originally rooted in educational psychology, the test evaluates five distinct cognitive skills: inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments. These are not abstract academic categories. They map almost exactly onto what philosophy departments have spent centuries trying to teach.Employers began leaning heavily on this kind of tool after repeated studies showed that interviews alone are poor predictors of job performance. A structured critical thinking test, the research suggested, adds predictive validity that unstructured conversations simply cannot. Today, major law firms in the UK routinely ask trainees to sit a Watson-Glaser before any face-to-face meeting. Several North American MBA programs have incorporated similar assessments into their admissions review.Candidates preparing for these roles increasingly seek out a critical thinking test to understand the format and sharpen their reasoning before test day. That level of deliberate preparation was once the preserve of philosophy seminars. Now it's something anyone with professional ambitions is expected to do independently.

What Philosophers Have to Add

Here is where things get genuinely interesting. Philosophers have been debating the nature of good reasoning for millennia, and their concerns about formalized tests are worth taking seriously. Does a timed multiple-choice format actually capture the kind of slow, reflective thinking that leads to real insight? Can a 30-minute battery detect whether someone will ask the right question when the stakes are high?The honest answer is partially. What a well-constructed Watson-Glaser practice test does well is isolate specific cognitive habits—the tendency to confuse correlation with causation, the failure to distinguish between what is stated and what is merely implied, and the common error of accepting a conclusion before fully evaluating the premises that support it. These are real intellectual weaknesses, and identifying them early has genuine value.What no test can fully capture is philosophical temperament—the disposition to sit with uncertainty, to revise a view when evidence demands it, and to take seriously the strongest version of a position you intend to challenge. That, for now, is still something that needs to be cultivated in the classroom, in seminars, and through sustained reading.

Preparation as an Intellectual Practice

There is a case to be made that working through a Watson-Glaser practice test is not merely a tactical exercise. Done reflectively, it forces you to slow down and examine the assumptions embedded in everyday arguments—precisely the skill that philosophy training is supposed to develop.The categories the Watson-Glaser uses—inference, deduction, and interpretation—are not alien to anyone who has read a logic textbook or worked through an introductory epistemology course. But encountering them in a timed, applied context reveals something that purely theoretical study often obscures: knowing the definition of a valid argument is not the same as reliably constructing one under pressure.For graduate students and early-career academics entering fields beyond the university—policy, law, consulting, journalism—familiarity with what a formal critical thinking assessment test is becoming a practical necessity, not a nice-to-have.

A Useful Provocation

The broader trend should prompt philosophy departments to ask a pointed question: if structured reasoning tests are identifying gaps that professional training programs consider disqualifying, what does that say about how we are—or are not—teaching applied critical thinking?The answer isn't simply to teach to the test. It's to take the underlying skills more seriously as practical, transferable competencies—not just as the background conditions of good philosophical argument, but as capabilities that graduates will need and will be tested on the moment they step outside the academy.For resources on philosophy in professional and public contexts, visit theAmerican Philosophical Association.