Critical thinking is considered one of the key competencies of university students and its importance increases with the effort to develop students' creativity, independence as well as scientific thinking. For this skill, it is important to have confidence in one's ability to solve problems, find relevant answers or to formulate defensible conclusions. The aim of the paper was to determine whether academic self-efficacy acted as a precondition for critical thinking in university students. A total of 451 university students were involved in this study. The data were obtained by The Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and the Academic Self-Efficacy Scale. The results showed that academic self-efficacy predicted all the three dimensions of critical thinking, albeit with a small amount of explained variance ranging from 8.1 to 12.2%. Although the main factor moderating each dimension of critical thinking is the effect of academic self-efficacy, a gender interaction effect was also found, which was more evident for males than females.