Course syllabus

Critical Thinking — Syllabus

Critical Thinking Free sample edition

Critical Thinking is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as a passage you cannot tell is an argument or an explanation, a counterexample that will not come together, or a screening table whose counts refuse to add up, and reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the introductory, one-semester critical-thinking course: informal logic and reasoning, taken as a general-education course by students in every major, with no prerequisite. It teaches the reasoner's way of looking at any claim: what exactly is being claimed, what is offered in support, whether that support would establish the claim if it were true, and whether it is true. It is a skills course. Each week hands you one test to run on short, real-feeling passages, such as a letter to the editor, an ad, a product claim, a campus proposal, or a news paragraph, and every test ends in one plain sentence that names the verdict and the reason for it.

The course moves from structure to evaluation, from deductive to inductive reasoning, and from the passage on the page to the evidence in the world. It opens by finding arguments and telling them apart from explanations (Week 1), then puts them in standard form and maps them (Week 2). Next come validity, soundness, strength, and the counterexample method (Week 3), the conditional forms and the two formal fallacies (Week 4), and categorical reasoning with Venn diagrams described in words (Week 5). Language and meaning (Week 6) comes before the fallacies of relevance (Week 7), because equivocation and loaded wording are where many fallacies live. Week 8 reviews the first half by the one test or distinction each topic asks for, adds the fallacies of presumption, and holds the midterm. The second half turns to evidence: samples and analogies (Week 9), causes and confounding factors (Week 10), percentages, risks, base rates, and misleading graphs (Week 11), sources and the checking of them (Week 12), and scientific explanation (Week 13). Then the tests turn inward, to the biases in your own reasoning (Week 14), and the course closes with reasoning about values and a synthesis of every test (Week 15).

One running question is argued all term: should the campus library stay open around the clock during finals week? It starts as an illustrative campus-newsletter passage with no named author, and each week's tool is run on the same argument as the tool arrives, until in Week 15 you argue it in full, with its strongest objection and a reply. Around it, the examples come from campus life, health and science news, ads and product claims, workplace decisions, sports and weather, and community proposals. Every passage you analyze is illustrative, labelled that way, and attributed to no real person, party, outlet, or product; people in the cases get roles, such as a student senator or a store manager, not names.

A few real cases are taught in words: the 1936 Literary Digest poll, as a lesson in why a sample's representativeness matters more than its size; the National Cancer Institute's explanation of how a large relative reduction in a risk can be a small absolute one; and a Federal Trade Commission consumer alert on cloned voices. The thinkers behind the tools are named with their work on first mention, among them Locke (1690), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, for the Latin names of several fallacies; Mill (1843), A System of Logic, for the methods of finding a cause; Venn (1880), "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings", for the diagrams; Wason (1960), "On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task", for the classic rule-discovery experiment later read as showing confirmation bias; Harman (1965), "The Inference to the Best Explanation", for that phrase; and Tversky and Kahneman (1974), "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases", for availability and anchoring. No line from any thinker is quoted.

This is an introductory reasoning course. It is not a survey of philosophy's big questions, not a formal-logic course (there are no logic symbols and no proofs, and a truth table appears once, as a check), and not a statistics course: percentages, risks, base rates, and one two-way table are read and reasoned about, never modeled.

A note on arguments and contested questions

The course argues about arguments, not about current politics. No living politician, party, outlet, or commentator appears anywhere in it. Some findings are settled, and the course states them plainly: that affirming the consequent is an invalid form, that a correlation table can hide a confounding factor, that a sample drawn only from people already in the library late at night is biased. Other questions are argued by thoughtful people, and on those the course presents each side at full strength and gives no verdict.

The running question. The case for staying open: during finals week many students need a quiet, safe place to study late at night; the library is the only quiet, safe, well-lit space on campus large enough to meet that need; and the campus should provide study space students need when it can do so at modest cost, which an illustrative staffing estimate suggests it can. The strongest objection: overnight hours encourage all-night studying, losing sleep can hurt exam performance, and the campus should not provide a service that helps students harm themselves. You will build both sides, map them, and write a reply, and you may argue for either answer.
Moral frameworks. Week 15 presents three frameworks as tools for organizing reasons. A consequence-based view judges an act by its outcomes; its strongest case is that outcomes for everyone affected matter, and its standard objections are that outcomes are hard to predict and that it can seem to allow harming a few for a gain to many. A duty-based view judges an act by whether it keeps duties or rules; its strongest case is that some things should not be done to people even for good outcomes, and its standard objections are that duties can conflict and that keeping a rule can lead to a bad outcome. A character-based view asks what a person of good character would do; its strongest case is that it looks at the whole person and their judgment over time, and its standard objection is that it can give little specific guidance in a hard case. The course prescribes none of them.

Throughout, you will practice calling an argument valid while rejecting its conclusion, calling an argument weak while agreeing with its conclusion, and stating the other side at its strongest before you reply. No grade depends on which side you take; your grade depends on the fairness of your reconstruction, the test you choose and show, and the strength of your reply.

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

Pen and paper, or any free diagramming tool: for argument maps and Venn diagrams. Every map and diagram in the course is also described in words, and you may describe yours in words too.
A free spreadsheet: Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet, for the counts, frequency tables, risk tables, and two-way tables in the weekly Argument Workshop. Each step is spelled out, and every Workshop also gives a pencil-and-paper route.
Free online reference encyclopedias of philosophy: for looking up a named concept, opened from the links on the week's page. None costs anything or asks you to register.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. Argument analysis and evaluation — reconstruct an argument in standard form or as a map and evaluate it with the test that fits it (validity and a counterexample, a fallacy check, a sampling or causal check, a base-rate or risk table), stating the verdict in one plain sentence.
Outcome B. Reasoned argument and intellectual integrity — build and defend an original argument that states the strongest opposing view fairly, supports every factual claim with a checked source, and verifies AI output before relying on it.

The nine course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's Start Here page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

Identify claims and arguments in everyday and academic passages, distinguishing arguments from explanations, reports, and unsupported assertions, and locate premises and conclusions with and without indicator words.
Analyze an argument by putting it in standard form, supplying unstated premises under the principle of charity, and mapping how its premises, objections, and replies connect, described in words.
Evaluate deductive reasoning: distinguish deductive from inductive arguments, apply validity, soundness, strength, and cogency, use the counterexample method, recognize the valid conditional forms and the two formal fallacies, state necessary and sufficient conditions, and test categorical syllogisms with Venn diagrams.
Explain how language shapes reasoning through definitions, vagueness, ambiguity, equivocation, and loaded wording, and identify the common informal fallacies of relevance and presumption while distinguishing a fallacy from a false premise and from legitimate criticism.
Evaluate inductive reasoning: judge generalizations by the size and representativeness of their samples, test arguments from analogy, and assess causal claims for confounding factors, reverse causation, and coincidence.
Reason accurately with numbers in public claims: separate percentages from percentage points and relative from absolute risk, work base-rate problems in natural frequencies, and detect misleading graphs.
Evaluate sources and evidence for credibility and relevant expertise, trace claims to their origins, check what independent sources say about a source, and detect out-of-context and AI-generated misinformation.
Assess scientific reasoning and one's own thinking: apply testability, controls, and inference to the best explanation, recognize warning signs of pseudoscience, and identify confirmation bias, availability, anchoring, motivated reasoning, and overconfidence, using concrete debiasing habits.
Reason about values and construct an original argument: separate the value premise from the factual premise in a moral argument, present ethical frameworks evenhandedly, state the opposing view at its strongest, and build and defend a well-supported argument with its strongest objection and a reply.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through as well.

A typical week runs in this order:

Start Here. Open the week's module overview. It lists the week's items in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 40 to 50 minutes). The week's primary reading, with every test worked step by step on a short passage. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a summary you submit.
Practice set (about 20 minutes). Ungraded practice with a coach, at your own pace, on fresh one-off passages.
Argument Workshop (about 90 minutes). One short passage worked end to end: you put it in standard form or map it, test it with the week's tool, write a short argument of your own on its question with the strongest objection and a reply, ask your chatbot to argue the other side and then map and test its argument before trusting any of it, and finally catch and correct a reasoning slip the chatbot makes.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's test to work on an arguable, applied question and on a passage of your own.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 35 minutes), lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. It reviews Weeks 1 to 7 by the one test or the one distinction each topic asks for, and its one piece of new material is the fallacies of presumption: the false dilemma, begging the question, and the loaded question. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, practice exam, and exam-prep tutorial.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, 5 points each. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, 10 points each, in every module except Week 8.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Argument Workshops, 50 points each, in every module except Week 8. Each is graded with a rubric that rewards a fair reconstruction, the right test applied and shown, the strength of your own argument and of the objection it answers, and a chatbot slip caught and corrected, never the side you take.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, 100 points each, in every module except Week 8.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, 10 points each, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 (50 points) and the cumulative final in Week 16 (100 points).

Each week's discussion and assignment ship in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group, for the same points.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the Start Here page, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are graded and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Weekly focus, lecture page, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Focus	Lecture page	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	What Critical Thinking Is: Claims, Arguments & Explanations	Lecture: What Critical Thinking Is: Claims, Arguments & Explanations	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	Analyzing Arguments	Lecture: Analyzing Arguments	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Deductive and Inductive Reasoning	Lecture: Deductive and Inductive Reasoning	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	Conditionals and Deductive Forms	Lecture: Conditionals and Deductive Forms	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	Categorical Reasoning	Lecture: Categorical Reasoning	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	Language and Meaning	Lecture: Language and Meaning	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	Fallacies of Relevance	Lecture: Fallacies of Relevance	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Inductive Generalization and Analogy	Lecture: Inductive Generalization and Analogy	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Causal Reasoning	Lecture: Causal Reasoning	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Numbers in the News	Lecture: Numbers in the News	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Evaluating Sources and Evidence	Lecture: Evaluating Sources and Evidence	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	Science and Explanation	Lecture: Science and Explanation	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	Bias and Decision-Making	Lecture: Bias and Decision-Making	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	Reasoning About Values and the Course Synthesis	Lecture: Reasoning About Values and the Course Synthesis	Tutorial, Argument Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	None	Final exam	None

The midterm in Week 8 covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 4 as taught in those weeks. The three fallacies of presumption are taught in Week 8 and practiced in its discussion and practice set; no midterm question is drawn from them. The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on every course objective: claims, arguments, explanations, and indicator words (Objective 1); standard form, supplied premises, the principle of charity, and argument maps (Objective 2); validity, soundness, strength, cogency, the counterexample method, the conditional forms and the two formal fallacies, necessary and sufficient conditions, and Venn diagrams (Objective 3); definitions, vagueness, ambiguity, equivocation, loaded wording, and the fallacies of relevance and presumption (Objective 4); samples, analogies, and causal claims (Objective 5); percentages and percentage points, relative and absolute risk, base rates in natural frequencies, and misleading graphs (Objective 6); credibility, tracing a claim, checking a source, and out-of-context and AI-generated misinformation (Objective 7); testability, controls, inference to the best explanation, the warning signs of pseudoscience, and the cognitive biases with their debiasing habits (Objective 8); and moral arguments, the three frameworks, steelmanning, and building and defending your own argument (Objective 9). Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's Start Here page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with tests worked on real-feeling passages, practice, and questions. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Argument Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each test builds on the weeks before it (you cannot test an argument you have not found, or map one you have not put in standard form), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips; keep to the weekly rhythm and talk to your instructor the moment a week stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its Start Here page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's points for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a reasoning course, integrity also means honest evidence and honest credit: every statistic, study, and quotation you use is real and traced to its source, every quotation is checked against the full original, every number you report is one you recomputed yourself, and a summary of another person's view states that view fairly. Three violations matter most in this course: submitting a statistic, study, quotation, or citation you did not check, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Every argument map, Venn diagram, truth table, graph, and table in the course, including any that a quiz or exam item refers to, is described in words as well as shown, and every logical form is written in plain words rather than symbols. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a sparring partner, and then asks you to map, test, and correct its reasoning by hand. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You do your own reconstruction and testing first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the self-scored report, your revised work, and the conversation share link. You remain the reasoner: the coach asks questions and checks your work; it does not write your reconstruction or your verdict.
Argument Workshops (a pair-consult step and a required AI-critique step). After your own work, you ask your chatbot to argue the other side, then map and test its argument before trusting any of it. Then you catch and correct one of its reasoning slips by hand, such as calling an argument valid that affirms the consequent or denies the antecedent, sticking a fallacy label on a sound argument or calling any criticism an attack on the person, summarizing the other side as a straw man, reporting a correlation as a cause, writing a percentage-point change as a percent or a relative risk without its base, inventing a statistic, a study, or a quotation, leaning on an authority outside its field, offering false certainty or false balance, generalizing from one anecdote, or writing a "neutral" summary that quietly takes a side.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can identify an argument, test its form, name a fallacy, and work a base-rate or risk problem.

A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a test, but it often sounds most confident where it is least reliable. It calls invalid forms valid, files ordinary criticism as a fallacy, reads causes into correlations, drops the base from a risk, and produces statistics, studies, quotations, and citations that look real and do not exist. Every number it offers you recompute yourself, and every quotation or citation you check against its source before you use it.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

Bring your own AI: access, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same points, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, such as your own health details when a passage about screening or risk reminds you of them, or private details about a friend, a coworker, or a club when you argue through an everyday moral question, and remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

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