Performance by Students Majoring in Philosophy and students
majoring in other areas on LSAT, GMAT, and the GRE (Verbal and
Quantitative):
A recent comprehensive study of college students' scores on major
tests used for admission to graduate and professional schools
shows that students majoring in Philosophy received scores substantially
higher than the average on each of the tests studied. The study
compared the scores of 550,000 college students who took the LSAT,
GMAT, and the verbal and quantitative portions of the
GRE with data collected over the previous eighteen
years and was conducted by the National Institute of Education
and reported in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.
The performance of PHILOSOPHY MAJORS
on all three tests was remarkable:
PHILOSOPHY MAJORS received higher scores on the LSAT,
for instance, than students in all other humanities areas, and
higher scores than all social and natural science majors except
economics and mathematics, and higher scores than all applied
majors.
Moreover, the differences are in most cases substantial:
PHILOSOPHY MAJORS scored 10% better than political science majors
on the LSAT.
PHILOSOPHY MAJORS outperformed business majors by a margin of
15% on the GMAT and outperformed every other
undergraduate major except mathematics.
PHILOSOPHY MAJORS' scores on the verbal portion of the GRE
were higher than in any other major even English; and although
several science majors showed higher averages in the quantitative
portion of the test, PHILOSOPHY MAJORS scored substantially higher
than all other humanities majors and were alone among humanities
majors in scoring above the overall average.