The California Critical Thinking Skills Test is the premier critical thinking skills test in the world today. Called the "gold standard" of critical thinking tests, the CCTST is based on the Delphi Expert Consensus Definition of Critical Thinking. The CCTST has been proven to predict strength in critical thinking in authentic problem situations and success on professional licensure examinations. The CCTST in all its forms provides an objective measure of critical thinking skills.

Different questions progressively invite test-takers to analyze or to interpret information presented, to draw accurate and warranted inferences; to evaluate inferences and to explain why they represent strong reasoning or weak reasoning, or to explain why a given evaluation of an inference is strong or weak. In these many ways the items collectively and individually invite the manifestation and demonstration of the reasoning skills required to succeed in a broad range of higher education and workplace settings.

Critical thinking can be manifested in the the successful application of one's skills to images, charts, graphs and diagrams as well, textual material. Improving on early versions of the CCTST which were entirely text-based, current versions of the CCTST incorporate these a wide range of images and graphical elements into the content of questions, thus enabling test-takers to demonstrate the range as well as the depth of their critical thinking skills.

So that the questions on the CCTST invite the application and demonstration of one's reasoning skills, the questions are designed to provide such specialized information as may be needed in order to form a well reasoned judgment about which response, from among those provided, is the best. Unlike other tests which may depend on memorization or which give advantage to those with greater knowledge about a given topic, all the versions of the CCTST family of critical thinking skills tests are measures of critical thinking skills.