Critical Thinking and Doctoral Completion: A Comparative Study of Timely and Delayed Graduates in Ugandan Universities

Timely completion is one of the key indicators of higher education effectiveness. Critical thinking, as an essential competency, may be influential in determining the completion rates of doctoral students. This study, therefore, compared levels of critical thinking for the doctoral graduates who completed on time and those who experienced delays in completion. The study adopted a quantitative ex post facto research design, with data collected using a standardised critical thinking self-assessment tool. Data were collected from 279 doctoral graduates who were selected using stratified random sampling. Data was analysed using descriptive statistics and an independent samples t-test, where results indicated that there is a statistically significant difference in the critical thinking scores between the doctoral graduates who completed on time and those who experienced delays in completion (p < .05). The negative t-test value (-4.022) and a negative mean difference (-2.60777) indicated that those who experienced delays in completion scored highly on critical thinking dispositions in comparison to those who completed on time. It was concluded that higher levels of critical thinking dispositions are associated with delayed completion and vice versa. The results contribute to the ongoing debates on timely completion in doctoral education and provide practical implications for graduate programme design. The study recommends training of doctoral students to transform their critical thinking dispositions into practice. Further research is suggested using a quasi-experimental design to study critical thinking dispositions and timely completion