Course

The AS Level Thinking Skills Exam consists of two parts, Problem solving (Paper 1) and Critical thinking (Paper 2). One hour and thirty minutes is allowed for Problem solving and one hour and forty-five minutes is allowed for Critical thinking. Both components include compulsory questions based on a variety of scenarios and multiple sources of evidence that assess students’ understanding of presented information, their ability to evaluate information and make conclusions about the information, and the extent to which they can generate explanations, form reasoned arguments, and identify appropriate methods for solving problems.

At the A Level, students complete two additional Papers. Problem Analysis and Solution (Paper 3) allows two hours to answer four questions presenting more extensive problems to be solved. These are more detailed, longer, more complex, and more difficult than those presented in Paper 1 and required skills to be combined to find solutions. Applied Reasoning (Paper 4) allows 1 hour and 45 minutes to respond to 4 questions referencing a number of provided Documents containing information and arguments around a common topic. Students must analyze the structure and strength of the reasoning, evaluate the specific pieces of evidence (often statistical), and construct a substantial reasoned argument making critical use of the evidence from the Documents.

Marks from Papers 1 & 2 are combined with Marks from Papers 3 & 4 to comprise the full A Level.