What Can't You Do With A Philosophy Degree?

Worries about just what standardized tests prove aside, I'm going to follow Vintage Piranha by pointing out that GRE takers who intend to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy drastically outperform all other GRE takers on the verbal reasoning and analytical writing sections of the test.  Data is available here.  Their analytical writing mean is 5.1 out of a possible 6.0, and their verbal reasoning mean is 589 out of a possible 800.  Compare with physics and astronomy (4.5/534), engineering (4.2/467), biological sciences (4.4/491), chemistry (4.4/487), english language and literature (4.9/559), early childhood education (4.1/418) and the social sciences (4.5/486).

Philosophers don't totally dominate the field when it comes to quantitative reasoning, but they do pretty well.  Like the verbal reasoning, this section is scored out of 800 possible points.  Vintage Piranha places them in fifteenth place out of a field of fifty, yet this is only because he counts each of the seven engineering disciplines (civil, mechanical, electrical, etc...) separately.  If we collapse the engineers into one class, the philosophers (636) lose only to the economists (706) and financiers (barely - 637), engineers (720), mathematicians (733), chemists (682), earth scientists (again, barely - 637), physicists/astronomers (738) and computer scientists (704).  I place them at 9th place in a field of thirty-six (by collapsing education as well).  For a discipline in the humanities with terribly low (university imposed) mathemtical requirements, that's pretty slick.

It is also well-known that philosophers (along with classicists) dominate the LSAT.  A list of the estimated IQ's of some of known history's greatest thinkers includes a proportionate number of philosophers, that is, the high number of philosophers one would expect.  You can also input some of your own scores to get some interesting interconversions and percentile data.  (Who knows how reliable this is.)  My GRE scores, for the record, were 650 (verbal), 780 (quantitative) and 6.0 (analytical writing).  According to the calculator here, that's the 99.865 percentile, a number which is at least roughly confirmed by the non-specialized standardized test data I have available.  Having never studied or reviewed for any general academic test in my life (in my case, the TCAP, PSAT, ACT, and GRE), this warms me over.  I'm done tooting my own horn.  For a little more data and a WSJ clipping, go here.

Comments

[thebizofknowledge]

I came across this blog while researching a particular academic test. You present some interesting ideas in general. I have known individuals who have not "studied" for various tests, but have a keen interest in life and learning, and who have done extremely well also.