Intuition would have us believe that English majors would score the highest on the verbal and analytical sections of the GRE, but that's not the case - philosophy majors reign supreme.
Furthermore, philosophy majors beat every non-hard science major when it comes to quantitative reasoning.
What do you think it is about studying philosophy that leads to the highest test scores in standardized tests, beating out even English majors on the verbal and analytical sections, and beating every non-hard science major in math?
One interpretation of this data is that perhaps students who are antecedently the smartest tend to become philosophy majors.
Or is there something intrinsic to studying philosophy that explains this?
Logic and Reasoning. I am a third year philosophy major and I must tell you the discussions can be grueling. Philosophy is fueled by the constant annotating of one's work as well as debate over its validity. Because philosophy majors are put under the microscope for their ability to reason both publicly and privately, they must master the linguistic skills necessary to be able to convince an audience about their point of view.
Also if you take, or have taken, a logic course, you will realize that there is an interesting amount of "math" behind the actual material.
One interpretation of this data is that perhaps students who are antecedently the smartest tend to become philosophy majors.
Or is there something intrinsic to studying philosophy that explains this?
While I don't have hard data to support this, I don't believe it's because of the prior intelligence distribution of the people coming in. Rather, I'm fairly sure that it's the curriculum.
It's nigh impossible to go through a present-day philosophy curriculum without being exposed to all of the following:
- Modern, post-Newtonian physics.
- Modern mathematics. (the set-theoretical/category-theoretical/logical side of it, at any rate.)
- Logic, including the 20th century developments spearheaded by Goedel and Tarski.
- Neuroscience.
- Computer science.
Add to that an extremely rigorous and voluminous writing requirement with an emphasis on clarity and distinctness rather than wispy nonsense (I learned more about good writing in one semester of undergraduate philosophy class than I did in a lifelong English curriculum, primary school all the way up) and you're going to get a student that is extraordinarily well-prepared for a general knowledge examination.
On the other hand, you can be an English major, a physics major, a computer science major, or a math major and never be exposed to the respective topics outside your major at all. Witness the number of educated people who run around spouting that everything has a cause, or that the soul controls the body, or any number of propositions that are rendered extremely dubious to outright impossible by knowledge from the fields that they were never exposed to. Philosophy, because it absorbs knowledge from those other fields to fuel itself, cannot be done without this exposure.
(I learned more about good writing in one semester of undergraduate philosophy class than I did in a lifelong English curriculum, primary school all the way up)
This. English courses stress creative interpretation. Philosophy requires clear comprehension.
I would hypothesize that if you ran a GRE-like test on people with higher degrees, the JDs would do best on verbal and writing, for the same reason.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
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I'm not sure how to interpret these results. I think they might suggest the difficulty in rigor of the 'average person' being able to pick up one of these fields.
I believe a large part of the reason involved is that philosophy requires critical thinking whereas in maths, you have a rigid structure of what to apply and where to get your solution. You follow the steps to get an answer in math, you think deeply to get an answer in philosophy.
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I'm not sure how to interpret these results. I think they might suggest the difficulty in rigor of the 'average person' being able to pick up one of these fields.
I think it's more just that their brains are trained to think in those patterns. Your brain is certainly trainable; it just takes a while.
And most people don't bother to train their brains for pattern recognition/rote memorization because it physically hurts. I mean really, genuinely hurts.
I believe a large part of the reason involved is that philosophy requires critical thinking whereas in maths, you have a rigid structure of what to apply and where to get your solution. You follow the steps to get an answer in math, you think deeply to get an answer in philosophy.
For the math you probably took, you may be right. For the math that you're required to do for a mathematics degree, you couldn't be more wrong. Upper division mathematics courses are almost 100% proof-based. This means that they could give a **** about your "answer", what you're graded on is showing the logical work that gets you there. Math and philosophy are actually extremely closely related fields; the level of argumentative formality required in these degrees surpasses every other field by a wide margin.
(I learned more about good writing in one semester of undergraduate philosophy class than I did in a lifelong English curriculum, primary school all the way up)
This. English courses stress creative interpretation. Philosophy requires clear comprehension.
I would hypothesize that if you ran a GRE-like test on people with higher degrees, the JDs would do best on verbal and writing, for the same reason.
And the best JD writers typically majored in philosophy, engineering, math, or physics in undergrad. Legal writing is technical writing, not creative writing, and even many lawyers don't grasp this.
My law school ran a yearly legal writing competition for 1Ls, and all the winners my year came from one of those undergrad majors, with the exception of one History major who was just a really smart dude.
Law school is full of English and Government majors, admittedly, but Law Review is full of philosophers and STEM majors.
I feel like I could provide any number of different Just So stories as to why this would be the case, but the truth is there are a half dozen other disciplines that I could do the same thing for, and I really don't know. I have intuitions and hypotheses, but nothing concrete.
I will say that, reflecting on my own course of study (I have a B.A. in Philosophy from Tufts University, which was intended as a pre-law degree before an opportunity to break into the games industry as a game designer changed everything for me), it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students would do well in these studies. In the classes I took, you did not get an A unless you had something new to bring to a discussion (subtle twist, radically new idea, whatever) that you could defend persuasively to a professional philosopher. That means a mastery of the material that goes far beyond surface level understanding, it means writing skills that can communicate genuinely fresh ideas (again, they might be subtle twists, but still) in ways that are readily understandable, and writing persuasively means understanding communication and your audience at a quite deep level.
So, like I said, it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students do well on these tests, it's just that I feel we could similarly 'explain' why half a dozen other majors were in that position if the results said they were tops.
I feel like I could provide any number of different Just So stories as to why this would be the case, but the truth is there are a half dozen other disciplines that I could do the same thing for, and I really don't know. I have intuitions and hypotheses, but nothing concrete.
I will say that, reflecting on my own course of study (I have a B.A. in Philosophy from Tufts University, which was intended as a pre-law degree before an opportunity to break into the games industry as a game designer changed everything for me), it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students would do well in these studies. In the classes I took, you did not get an A unless you had something new to bring to a discussion (subtle twist, radically new idea, whatever) that you could defend persuasively to a professional philosopher. That means a mastery of the material that goes far beyond surface level understanding, it means writing skills that can communicate genuinely fresh ideas (again, they might be subtle twists, but still) in ways that are readily understandable, and writing persuasively means understanding communication and your audience at a quite deep level.
So, like I said, it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students do well on these tests, it's just that I feel we could similarly 'explain' why half a dozen other majors were in that position if the results said they were tops.
Good man. Objectivity is important, especially for those who profess a strong interest in this field. I've heard of numerous studies with similar results that place positive emphasis on various (always differing) fields of knowledge - it's easy to jump on an ego bandwagon when provided with "scientific evidence" which infers that you're more intelligent than your peers due to a variable like your collegiate field of study.
I'm currently double majoring in English and Philosophy (I want to go to law school), and from what the professor's explained so far, it seems the reasoning behind Philosophy majors scoring as highly as they do on most graduate school entrance exams is that you're taught how to think critically, perform in depth analyses on various subject matter, and you're required to write, argue, etc. logically; you must question everything and do so in a matter that can be broken down and checked for accuracy, credibility, and satisfactory reasoning.
Not only that, but the actual subject matter discussed in class (at least in the class I'm in) is much more thought invoking than, say, an English discussion on a Shakespearean piece, an equation in math, or a series of steps in a Chemistry experiment. In Philosophy, there is no formula or textbook answer there for you, you must make the conclusions, and you must provide valid reasoning to support your conclusions and arguments as a whole.
As an aside, I heard Philosophy majors actually have one of (might've been the highest, actually) entrance rates into med school, too, which came as a surprise.
It tends to be a major you acquire useful skills you can apply in a wide variety of fields through more than a major you actually make a career out of.
A lot of places, particularly grad schools, love to see that you can construct a valid, logical argument to persuade a person or multiple people, break down thought processes, think creatively, get an answer through thinking rather than just memorising, etc.; you gain myriad invaluable skills many other people simply don't have, giving you a pretty good leg up as far as employment and grad school entrances go.
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
I can't speak to pre-med, but its actually not all that common in pre-law. Most people who are getting a degree that intend to go to law school specifically get an actual pre-law degree. The people in my Law school classes with philosophy always struck me as the people who realized after the fact that philosophy had no practical job applications and needed something they could get employed with.
That could, however, just have been my personal experience varying from the norm (of course).
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
I can't speak to pre-med, but its actually not all that common in pre-law. Most people who are getting a degree that intend to go to law school specifically get an actual pre-law degree. The people in my Law school classes with philosophy always struck me as the people who realized after the fact that philosophy had no practical job applications and needed something they could get employed with.
That could, however, just have been my personal experience varying from the norm (of course).
The advice we were given - this is before declaring as a philosophy major - was that you were better off getting a degree in one of a handful of other majors over getting a specifically pre-law degree. I declared as a philosophy major with the full intent of going straight into law school.
I have no idea if that was good advice or not, of course. Just passing on the way things were explained to me.
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
I can't speak to pre-med, but its actually not all that common in pre-law. Most people who are getting a degree that intend to go to law school specifically get an actual pre-law degree. The people in my Law school classes with philosophy always struck me as the people who realized after the fact that philosophy had no practical job applications and needed something they could get employed with.
That could, however, just have been my personal experience varying from the norm (of course).
Indeed, most of the people that I went to law school with who earned (or is that 'earned'?) a philosophy degree took to the law not because of a sincere passion for it but because it was an ex post facto attempt to justify their education to date and because a philosophy degree, while actually opening many doors, didn't open any doors that they wanted or they really couldn't be bothered doing their due diligence.
Philosophy courses, of course depending on what is taught and how they are taught (for instance, philosophy courses at some of my almae matres simply taught philosophy and only philosophy, whereas others taught, as part of philosophy or combined philosophy programs, philosophy and other things, such as natural sciences and psychology), are not necessarily better, or even good, training for, say, medical school or law school. In fact, what I realised from medical school is that the less you think, the better things are for you and everyone else. Interestingly, the interviews are designed to screen out those that don't work with people or teams of people as well as those that are simply too smart or imbalanced for their own, their prospective colleagues', and their prospective patients' good.
There are multiple factors to account for why philosophy majors, perhaps consistently, score highest among those taking the GRE. One of these factors that reasonably would play a big part of this would be that the are so often dealing with words and writing.
The advice we were given - this is before declaring as a philosophy major - was that you were better off getting a degree in one of a handful of other majors over getting a specifically pre-law degree. I declared as a philosophy major with the full intent of going straight into law school.
And that is sage and sound advice. Pre-law is one of the worst degrees to get if your end goal is going to law school. But, that does not change my (admittedly) anecdotal experience.
The reason pre-law is bad is because literally every pre-law major is applying to law school. Law Schools have to reach out to other majors (like engineering or other STEM degrees) to get people from there to go to law school. Basically if you go "pre-law" you are automatically making it harder to get in to most schools.
I acknowledge that there are people like you, who know that philosophy degrees (by themselves) are largely useless on the job market at large. But, there are a fair number of people who do not, and who realize it either during their last year in school or after graduating.
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
I can't speak for pre-law, but you'd need to get some experience in histology, endocrinology, physiology and organic chem to make it past pre-med and the MCAT. I would imagine that the logic training would be more useful if one were interested in pre-law. A prerequisite, even. Now, a minor in Philosophy to supplement your pre-med or pre-law major? I can see that as being something that would distinguish you in the eyes of the admissions committee. A strong cGPA, mGPA, and a history of classes based on organizing an argument would go a long way in either field. However, it is my experience from the medical side of thins that the committee favors a major in one of the hard sciences, in addition to certain prerequisites.
The advice we were given - this is before declaring as a philosophy major - was that you were better off getting a degree in one of a handful of other majors over getting a specifically pre-law degree. I declared as a philosophy major with the full intent of going straight into law school.
And that is sage and sound advice. Pre-law is one of the worst degrees to get if your end goal is going to law school. But, that does not change my (admittedly) anecdotal experience.
The reason pre-law is bad is because literally every pre-law major is applying to law school. Law Schools have to reach out to other majors (like engineering or other STEM degrees) to get people from there to go to law school. Basically if you go "pre-law" you are automatically making it harder to get in to most schools.
I acknowledge that there are people like you, who know that philosophy degrees (by themselves) are largely useless on the job market at large. But, there are a fair number of people who do not, and who realize it either during their last year in school or after graduating.
My own philosophy training was easily up to the challenge of the LSAT. That reading comp stuff was what we learned without even realizing we were learning it: it's just something you have to do to get to the actual content.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
It is like that joke I have shared here before. What is the question that no philosopher could answer?
How am I going to make a living with a philosophy degree?
Philosophy actually holds the distinction of being the discipline at the academy that influences the most fields of study. Ethics alone is important in the Medical profession and of deep concern to the field of Law.The philosophy of religion governs not religious thought but also the various non religious world views as well. Their is the philosophy of science and questions of epistemology that influences a wide variety of critical thought as well.
It is almost hard to think of a profession that could not be better practice with the help of philosophy.
My own philosophy training was easily up to the challenge of the LSAT. That reading comp stuff was what we learned without even realizing we were learning it: it's just something you have to do to get to the actual content.
Thats not surprising, any degree where logic is heavily emphasized (engineering is another one) tends to prepare well for the LSAT. Logic is really all the law is. It has its own internal logic, but its still all logic.
and memorization, lots of memorization
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Intuition would have us believe that English majors would score the highest on the verbal and analytical sections of the GRE, but that's not the case - philosophy majors reign supreme.
Furthermore, philosophy majors beat every non-hard science major when it comes to quantitative reasoning.
What do you think it is about studying philosophy that leads to the highest test scores in standardized tests, beating out even English majors on the verbal and analytical sections, and beating every non-hard science major in math?
One interpretation of this data is that perhaps students who are antecedently the smartest tend to become philosophy majors.
Or is there something intrinsic to studying philosophy that explains this?
Also if you take, or have taken, a logic course, you will realize that there is an interesting amount of "math" behind the actual material.
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"A man is defined by his sacrifices rather than his gifts"
While I don't have hard data to support this, I don't believe it's because of the prior intelligence distribution of the people coming in. Rather, I'm fairly sure that it's the curriculum.
It's nigh impossible to go through a present-day philosophy curriculum without being exposed to all of the following:
- Modern, post-Newtonian physics.
- Modern mathematics. (the set-theoretical/category-theoretical/logical side of it, at any rate.)
- Logic, including the 20th century developments spearheaded by Goedel and Tarski.
- Neuroscience.
- Computer science.
Add to that an extremely rigorous and voluminous writing requirement with an emphasis on clarity and distinctness rather than wispy nonsense (I learned more about good writing in one semester of undergraduate philosophy class than I did in a lifelong English curriculum, primary school all the way up) and you're going to get a student that is extraordinarily well-prepared for a general knowledge examination.
On the other hand, you can be an English major, a physics major, a computer science major, or a math major and never be exposed to the respective topics outside your major at all. Witness the number of educated people who run around spouting that everything has a cause, or that the soul controls the body, or any number of propositions that are rendered extremely dubious to outright impossible by knowledge from the fields that they were never exposed to. Philosophy, because it absorbs knowledge from those other fields to fuel itself, cannot be done without this exposure.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I would hypothesize that if you ran a GRE-like test on people with higher degrees, the JDs would do best on verbal and writing, for the same reason.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
perenially it went something like
1) philosophy
2) mathematics/physics
3) engineering.
I'm not sure how to interpret these results. I think they might suggest the difficulty in rigor of the 'average person' being able to pick up one of these fields.
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I think it's more just that their brains are trained to think in those patterns. Your brain is certainly trainable; it just takes a while.
And most people don't bother to train their brains for pattern recognition/rote memorization because it physically hurts. I mean really, genuinely hurts.
For the math you probably took, you may be right. For the math that you're required to do for a mathematics degree, you couldn't be more wrong. Upper division mathematics courses are almost 100% proof-based. This means that they could give a **** about your "answer", what you're graded on is showing the logical work that gets you there. Math and philosophy are actually extremely closely related fields; the level of argumentative formality required in these degrees surpasses every other field by a wide margin.
And the best JD writers typically majored in philosophy, engineering, math, or physics in undergrad. Legal writing is technical writing, not creative writing, and even many lawyers don't grasp this.
My law school ran a yearly legal writing competition for 1Ls, and all the winners my year came from one of those undergrad majors, with the exception of one History major who was just a really smart dude.
Law school is full of English and Government majors, admittedly, but Law Review is full of philosophers and STEM majors.
I will say that, reflecting on my own course of study (I have a B.A. in Philosophy from Tufts University, which was intended as a pre-law degree before an opportunity to break into the games industry as a game designer changed everything for me), it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students would do well in these studies. In the classes I took, you did not get an A unless you had something new to bring to a discussion (subtle twist, radically new idea, whatever) that you could defend persuasively to a professional philosopher. That means a mastery of the material that goes far beyond surface level understanding, it means writing skills that can communicate genuinely fresh ideas (again, they might be subtle twists, but still) in ways that are readily understandable, and writing persuasively means understanding communication and your audience at a quite deep level.
So, like I said, it doesn't surprise me that philosophy students do well on these tests, it's just that I feel we could similarly 'explain' why half a dozen other majors were in that position if the results said they were tops.
Good man. Objectivity is important, especially for those who profess a strong interest in this field. I've heard of numerous studies with similar results that place positive emphasis on various (always differing) fields of knowledge - it's easy to jump on an ego bandwagon when provided with "scientific evidence" which infers that you're more intelligent than your peers due to a variable like your collegiate field of study.
EDIT: Wow, this is an old discussion. My bad.
Not only that, but the actual subject matter discussed in class (at least in the class I'm in) is much more thought invoking than, say, an English discussion on a Shakespearean piece, an equation in math, or a series of steps in a Chemistry experiment. In Philosophy, there is no formula or textbook answer there for you, you must make the conclusions, and you must provide valid reasoning to support your conclusions and arguments as a whole.
As an aside, I heard Philosophy majors actually have one of (might've been the highest, actually) entrance rates into med school, too, which came as a surprise.
It tends to be a major you acquire useful skills you can apply in a wide variety of fields through more than a major you actually make a career out of.
A lot of places, particularly grad schools, love to see that you can construct a valid, logical argument to persuade a person or multiple people, break down thought processes, think creatively, get an answer through thinking rather than just memorising, etc.; you gain myriad invaluable skills many other people simply don't have, giving you a pretty good leg up as far as employment and grad school entrances go.
My uncle was a philosophy major who went and made his own company dealing with steel-works. Previously he ran a restaurant and a couple other things.
Eccentric man. Makes a boat-load of money from what I know though.
It's a common pre-law and pre-med degree. Philosophy as a university subject is training in logic, reading comprehension and critical thought, and I've found it to be applicable to virtually every activity I've engaged in (I'm a game designer and programmer).
I can't speak to pre-med, but its actually not all that common in pre-law. Most people who are getting a degree that intend to go to law school specifically get an actual pre-law degree. The people in my Law school classes with philosophy always struck me as the people who realized after the fact that philosophy had no practical job applications and needed something they could get employed with.
That could, however, just have been my personal experience varying from the norm (of course).
The advice we were given - this is before declaring as a philosophy major - was that you were better off getting a degree in one of a handful of other majors over getting a specifically pre-law degree. I declared as a philosophy major with the full intent of going straight into law school.
I have no idea if that was good advice or not, of course. Just passing on the way things were explained to me.
Philosophy courses, of course depending on what is taught and how they are taught (for instance, philosophy courses at some of my almae matres simply taught philosophy and only philosophy, whereas others taught, as part of philosophy or combined philosophy programs, philosophy and other things, such as natural sciences and psychology), are not necessarily better, or even good, training for, say, medical school or law school. In fact, what I realised from medical school is that the less you think, the better things are for you and everyone else. Interestingly, the interviews are designed to screen out those that don't work with people or teams of people as well as those that are simply too smart or imbalanced for their own, their prospective colleagues', and their prospective patients' good.
There are multiple factors to account for why philosophy majors, perhaps consistently, score highest among those taking the GRE. One of these factors that reasonably would play a big part of this would be that the are so often dealing with words and writing.
And that is sage and sound advice. Pre-law is one of the worst degrees to get if your end goal is going to law school. But, that does not change my (admittedly) anecdotal experience.
The reason pre-law is bad is because literally every pre-law major is applying to law school. Law Schools have to reach out to other majors (like engineering or other STEM degrees) to get people from there to go to law school. Basically if you go "pre-law" you are automatically making it harder to get in to most schools.
I acknowledge that there are people like you, who know that philosophy degrees (by themselves) are largely useless on the job market at large. But, there are a fair number of people who do not, and who realize it either during their last year in school or after graduating.
It was. Pre-law is bad.
I can't speak for pre-law, but you'd need to get some experience in histology, endocrinology, physiology and organic chem to make it past pre-med and the MCAT. I would imagine that the logic training would be more useful if one were interested in pre-law. A prerequisite, even. Now, a minor in Philosophy to supplement your pre-med or pre-law major? I can see that as being something that would distinguish you in the eyes of the admissions committee. A strong cGPA, mGPA, and a history of classes based on organizing an argument would go a long way in either field. However, it is my experience from the medical side of thins that the committee favors a major in one of the hard sciences, in addition to certain prerequisites.
It's not really that, but if you look up "LSAT scores by major," the "Pre-Law" majors score VERY low compared to many other majors.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
It is like that joke I have shared here before. What is the question that no philosopher could answer?
Philosophy actually holds the distinction of being the discipline at the academy that influences the most fields of study. Ethics alone is important in the Medical profession and of deep concern to the field of Law.The philosophy of religion governs not religious thought but also the various non religious world views as well. Their is the philosophy of science and questions of epistemology that influences a wide variety of critical thought as well.
It is almost hard to think of a profession that could not be better practice with the help of philosophy.
Thats not surprising, any degree where logic is heavily emphasized (engineering is another one) tends to prepare well for the LSAT. Logic is really all the law is. It has its own internal logic, but its still all logic.
and memorization, lots of memorization