The ability to disagree - the real test of critical thinking

There is a hidden skills gap that employers are missing: High-performing graduates who don’t challenge. Dina Eltabey, Teaching Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, explains what universities and employers can do.

Evidence suggests persistent concerns about graduate work-readiness. ISE’s Student Development Survey 2026 shows fewer employers consider graduates fully prepared upon entry to the workplace. Employers continue to highlight gaps in capabilities such as resilience and communication.

Parallel findings from the National Association of Colleges and Employers indicate a persistent gap between students‘ self-assessed proficiency and employer evaluations, particularly in areas such as critical thinking and communication.

Earlier evidence from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2015) similarly points to employer concerns about graduates’ preparedness, particularly in higher-order cognitive skills such as critical thinking.

In a previous article for the Institute of Student Employers, I described the ambition–collaboration paradox: driven students who struggle with real-time teamwork, often defaulting to task-splitting rather than genuine co-creation.

That insight appeared to resonate with practitioners. However, this points to a deeper underlying issue: Why do capable, motivated graduates struggle to engage productively with disagreement and ambiguity?

The real problem isn‘t disengagement — it’s low intellectual friction

In many programmes students are working hard and performing well, but effort is often optimised for performance rather than challenge. Questions become procedural (‘Will this be on the exam?’), discussions converge quickly, and frameworks are applied rather than interrogated.

This is not disengagement, but a feature of high-performing systems that prioritise clarity and efficiency — often at the expense of intellectual friction.

This dynamic is most visible in humanities, social sciences and management education, where ambiguity and interpretation are central. In foundational STEM contexts (e.g., calculus or coding basics), clarity and correct answers are rightly prioritised, so the argument applies less strongly.

It is also important to note that poorly designed high-challenge environments can be exclusionary. The goal is not adversarial classrooms, but normalised, low-stakes disagreement with clear ground rules — safe for all learners, including those with anxiety or different educational backgrounds.

The pedagogical complacency loop

This pattern is not incidental — it is systemic. It operates through what we can call the pedagogical complacency loop.

A lecturer presents a contested idea. No one challenges it. Silence is interpreted as understanding. Over time:

• Fewer opportunities for debate are designed
• Students stop expecting to be challenged
• Teaching settles into safe, convergent patterns

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: Students don‘t challenge → educators receive no resistance → teaching becomes smoother → students become more passive → challenge disappears

This is not about poor teaching or unmotivated students. It is a system-level adaptation driven by incentives towards performance, clarity and efficiency.

And the loop does not stay in the classroom. It travels with graduates into your organisation.

How this shows up in your organisation

Employers see the effects clearly:

• Graduates default to agreement — even when they recognise flaws
• Group work becomes task allocation rather than idea development
• Candidates defer to authority and seek premature consensus

These are not fixed traits. They are learned behavioural defaults shaped by prior environments.

The result is low challenge fluency: limited ability to question assumptions, engage in constructive disagreement, and adapt thinking in real time.

Challenge fluency is the behavioural enactment of critical thinking under social conditions of disagreement. In other words, it is not whether graduates can think critically in isolation, but whether they can express, test and revise that thinking in interaction with others.

Employer role in reinforcing low challenge fluency

It would be incomplete to place the burden solely on universities. Employers themselves inadvertently reinforce low challenge fluency through their own internal systems.

Performance management processes often reward execution, alignment, and ‘not rocking the boat’. Meeting cultures default to consensus, with senior voices dominating and juniors learning that silence is safe.

Leadership modelling is especially powerful: when managers shut down questions or treat dissent as insubordination, early-career employees rapidly adapt by withholding challenge.

Promotion systems frequently elevate agreeable, low-friction performers over those who raise constructive objections — even when those objections prove correct in hindsight.

In short, many organisations have built their own complacency loops, mirroring the pedagogical one.

Graduates do not unlearn challenge fluency on their own; they are actively retrained into agreement by the very employers who then lament its absence. Breaking this cycle therefore requires internal HR and leadership audits, not just better graduate screening.

The evidence: why we should take challenge fluency seriously

Concerns about graduates’ critical thinking skills are not merely anecdotal. The OECD’s analysis of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) demonstrates that critical thinking scores predict post-higher education outcomes, while employers and advisors consistently rate these skills as essential for career success (Zahner, James & Lehrfeld, 2022).

At the same time, broader evidence within the OECD report indicates a persistent gap between higher education qualifications and the development of these generic skills, suggesting that many graduates may enter the workforce without fully developed critical thinking capabilities.

Experimental research shows that when groups are implicitly rewarded for agreement, they are more likely to converge on stable but suboptimal decisions, reducing their ability to adapt to changing conditions (Abofol, Erev & Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2023).

Complementing this, emerging work in educational assessment suggests that open-ended, collaborative tasks capture dimensions of reasoning and engagement that are not readily observable through standardised critical thinking tests (Paul, Sinha & Cochran, 2023).

Together, these insights support a shift toward assessing not only individual cognitive skills but also how individuals navigate disagreement and collective problem-solving in real-time interaction.

Contextual calibration

That said, the argument should not be read as ‘more challenge is always better’. In roles requiring rapid execution, regulatory compliance, or high-stakes safety (e.g., air traffic control, surgical teams), low-friction protocols and deference to procedure are essential.

Challenge fluency must therefore be contextually calibrated: high in strategy, innovation, and problem-solving roles; lower in strictly protocol-driven or time-critical environments.

The goal is not to maximise dissent everywhere, but to ensure graduates can judge when and how to challenge appropriately.

A practical tool: the Challenge Fluency Index

To move beyond general observations, employers need a way to assess these behaviours directly.

The Challenge Fluency Index (CFI) is an emerging behavioural framework designed to evaluate how candidates engage with disagreement in practice. It translates an often intangible capability into observable behaviours that can be assessed in interviews or assessment centres.

The CFI shifts evaluation from ‘Are they confident?’ to “Can they engage productively in intellectual friction?’.

While still in early application, the CFI offers a practical starting point for organisations seeking to make challenge — not just performance — visible in their evaluation processes.

What employers can do

You hire high-performing graduates who won‘t challenge assumptions. This becomes a skills gap you created by accepting it. How can you escape it?

• Reward dissent in assessment centres: Add one scored dimension to every group exercise: ‘Initiated constructive dissent’.
• Force rejected thinking into deliverables: Require a rejected alternatives log for every major team recommendation.
• Make challenge a probation milestone: Within 90 days: lead an assumption audit, submit a written challenge, receive CFI feedback. HR tracks. Pass/fail by role.
• Screen with a CFI interview scale: Replace vague teamwork questions with two behavioural questions: ‘When did you change your mind in a group?’ and/or ‘When did you challenge majority opinion?’.

A shared agenda: concrete commitments

Breaking the complacency loop requires coordinated action:

• Universities: Audit modules for ‘challenge presence’ — track conceptual questioning, not just satisfaction scores
• Employers: Add CFI‑based indicator to assessment centre rubrics and share insights with ISE

Restoring intellectual friction

The issue is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of structured exposure to challenge. Without repeated practice in disagreement, graduates do not develop:

• Critical thinking
• Adaptive reasoning
• Collaborative problem-solving

These capabilities do not emerge automatically from academic success. They are built through intellectual friction. If challenge is absent from learning, it will be absent from work — and no amount of downstream training can fully compensate for that deficit.

The task for universities and employers is not to increase difficulty, but to restore challenge as a normal, supported and assessed part of learning and work. That shift is practical, measurable and overdue.