Reading Philosophy Will Help Your GRE Score – Featuring Book Recommendations!

Take a look at this table of GRE scores by major:

source

Notice anything in particular? Any majors that tend to do especially well in particular subject areas? Any lines highlighted in bright yellow?

You’re planning on taking the GRE, so hopefully you figured out that philosophy majors have the highest average score on both the verbal and the writing sections.

But it gets even better for philosophy students. If you look at the most recent score breakdown released by ETS, you’ll notice that over 5% of philosophy majors got a perfect score on the verbal sections. The next closest? Religion and theology, with a mere 2.5% getting a perfect score.

And for the writing section? 12.4% of philosophy majors got a perfect score, with religion and theology majors coming in a very distant second at 8.3%, and English majors struggling along at a mere 7.6%.

What does all this mean?

One, that students who are good at verbal reasoning and writing are probably more likely to go into philosophy in the first place.

But also, four years of constant practice at reading, writing, and dissecting logical arguments makes you pretty darn good at exactly the skills that the GRE is testing.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go back to school for four more years and major in philosophy in order to reap the benefits. All you need to do is read some philosophy in your spare time, when you would otherwise be Snapchatting/Instagraming/playing Pokemon Go. After all, if you’ve checked out my step by step guide to studying for the GRE, you’ll know that you should already be reading good non-fiction in your spare time and writing practice essays every now and then.

Want to Do Well on the Verbal Section? Read Scientific Papers

Hello devoted readers, extremely long time no see! Here’s a random studying suggestion.

One of those most important things you can do to boost your score on the verbal section, in my humble opinion, is to start reading a whole bunch of non-fiction. I’ve already offered some suggestions for places to start, from a bunch of random books I like to good old fashioned psychology textbooks.

But we can get even more specific than that.

When you’re taking the verbal section of the GRE, I can guarantee you’ll end up having to read a handful of excerpts from scientific papers. These will probably be on subjects that you know absolutely nothing about (I think that I ended up reading about algae blooms around the world at some point), so unless you’re a supercomputer who knows everything there is to know, you have to be able to read a fairly dry scientific text and, without any background knowledge, understand what it is about and what it is trying to argue.

Reading Psychology is Good for You

Psychology gets a bad rep these days. Go to a random physics department somewhere and start talking to people, and odds are it won’t take long to find someone who looks down on psychology as not a “real” science. I distinctly remember deciding to take an introductory psych course as a freshman in college, only to have multiple people, who I ordinarily looked up to as intelligent and discerning people, wonder aloud in a not-so-subtle way why I was wasting my time on a “bullshit science” such as psychology. After all, there are plenty of good hard sciences that I could learn, like chemistry or biology.

However, this somewhat less than stellar reputation for ease and lack of rigor couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite the fact that people all over the country seem to constantly be promoting STEM courses as best for teaching rigorous critical thinking skills, I honestly feel that I learned more about being a critical thinker in my introductory psychology course than all the science, math, and even philosophy classes I took put together. And most of that, I believe, came from just reading the textbook.

Finding Time to Read

One of the first things I recommend you start doing when you study for the GRE is to start reading. While it might sound less important than more traditional things that your old schoolteachers would recognize as studying, like buckling down and going through a workbook till you’re exhausted, don’t be fooled. If you spend two months studying, and read for just a little bit each day, you can easily rack up a ton of “studying” time. Personally, I probably racked up a good hundred hours of practice over the course of my three months studying, just by reading on the way to work, which probably more than tripled the amount of time I spent preparing for the verbal section.

The good news is, this shouldn’t be yet another Thing You Need To Do. It should be fun! You should be reading things that you enjoy, not forcing yourself through page after page on the migratory patterns of swallows (unless that’s your thing).

A picture because I made a reference