I think that one reason for higher critical-thinking scores for certain majors (English etc.) may be due to the training received in college. I'm guessing that a person would receive some decent training in English-related skills in elementary and high school, not only encouraging an interest in the subject but pretraining them for college. Then in college, those abilities would be honed further.
I submit that their scores are lower because
as a group, they aren't as bright as the people who got degrees in subjects like English and chemistry. Many simply don't have that level of ability.
Yes, training at any level helps and the extra training helped the English majors do better. But I will also submit that the ones who lack talent also lack interest. I also believe that a lot of them drop out of harder majors and go into easier majors because the traditional college majors are just too hard for them.
Mind, I'm not criticizing these students: I'm criticizing a system that creates unrealistic expectations by pretending that everyone can do a degree in English or engineering if you just "give them a chance."
They give them a chance in part by watering down courses in high school, heaping on more homework and tests, and pretending that the courses are "rigorous." My son's geometry teacher skipped 90% of the chapter on right triangles this week: no proofs, no geometric means, no intro to trig, no similar triangles. Part of the problem is that she's disorganized and poor planner, but another part of the problem is that she completely failed to see how critically important the skipped subject matter is. And the textbook was already watered down to the point of being ridiculously easy.
When our schools do this kind of thing, they cheat students in so many ways. First, they tell them that they know geometry and algebra, when in fact they don't. So the kids end up in remedial math and no one understands why. Then, when the kids get into a real course on the subject, it's hard, they can't do it, and they don't understand why because they did so well in high school. But by now they have student loans for courses that should have been taught properly in high school but weren't.
Added: bringing this all back together. IMO, the courses are being watered down because the students being encouraged to take them either aren't smart enough to do a serious geometry/algebra/etc. course or need more time to learn the stuff that comes before these courses. And yes, I think that many of the teachers also lack ability, which compounds the problem.
Yet our schools cling to the fantasy that shoving kids into these courses will make everything okay. It doesn't, and research, test scores, and the kinds of jobs they end up in are all showing that fact.
