Chapter 9 of Ethics Bowl to the Rescue! is all about the connection between studying philosophy and scoring higher on standardized tests. Whether we personally care about state-mandated primary or secondary school tests, college or grad school entrance exam scores, is irrelevant, because administrators who decide whether to support existing Ethics Bowl programs or found new ones often do. For years, advocates have been able to cite a study by Scottish researchers Trickey and Topping that found that 10-to-12-year-olds who participated in one hour of weekly philosophical discussion improved their verbal, non-verbal, and quantitative scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test by an average of 7 points compared to a control group. This was cool and encouraging, but small and obscure. It was the pretty much the best we had to offer, so we’d offer it anyway. That is, it was the best we had to offer until this summer when researchers Michael Vazquez and Michael Prinzing released a much broader and more impressive meta-analysis of college-aged students. Here’s an excerpt from the book – enjoy, and thank you, Michaels!
If you’re encouraged by Topping and Trickey’s work, but discouraged that this is the best we can do, would a multi-year analysis covering over half a million undergrads from 800 U.S. colleges and universities help? Thanks to the extended labors of Michael Prinzing of Wake Forest and Michael Vazquez of UNC, your wish is my command.
Published by the Journal of the American Philosophical Association in 2025, barely in time to be included in this book, the Michaels sought to scrutinize the claim that studying philosophy boosts test scores. Using mathematical wizardry and a fancy stats program called “R,” they isolated test performance improvement by comparing college majors’ average law school (LSAT) and grad school (GRE) entrance exam scores relative to students’ pre-college SAT scores. That way, they’d reveal not whether students who gravitate to philosophy happen to be good at taking tests (they apparently are), but whether studying philosophy improves test-taking ability. In other words, they sought out to answer whether phil majors became comparatively better at standardized test-taking over the course of college, compared to students of comparable pre-college ability who studied other subjects. For good measure, they threw in student self-reports on scholarly virtues to see which college majors attracted and cultivated the most serious students. How did philosophy fare?
Our results indicated that students with better verbal reasoning abilities and more curiosity, intellectual rigor, and open-mindedness are more likely to major in philosophy. They also indicated that, after adjusting for baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform other students on these measures. In fact, on average, philosophy majors score higher than all other majors on the GRE Verbal and LSAT, as well as a self-report measure designed to assess good habits of mind.[1]
If you take a look at the study, which is openly available online (just google the title: “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers”), flip to page 11 to see philosophy majors at the tippy top of the adjusted average LSAT scores table—ahead of political science, history, chemistry, and all flavors of engineering. On the GRE Verbal table, philosophy beats every major again, including languages and literature, and even English. On the GRE Quantitative, philosophy is middle of the pack, but certainly not at the bottom, and primarily behind math-heavy majors including mathematics/statistics, physics, computer science, and accounting, though somehow business administration and management beat us (dang it…).
The study is brand new, and maybe some future criticism will reveal flaws. Plus, I’m predisposed to want it to be true, and you might be as well. But it sure seems credible, even if the methodology is way over my head (mixed-effects regressions for dichotomous outcomes with random intercepts—what?).[2]
Independent of whether we’re fluent in Statistician, thanks to Vazquez and Prinzing, when we pitch Ethics Bowl and philosophy to administrators, we now have a recent, broad, ultra-impressive study to cite. And the news gets even better. I reached out to the Michaels for their help with this section, and they shared that Ethics Bowl-specific test score improvement studies are on their research agenda. Shoot yeah. Thank you, Michaels!
[1] “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, published by Cambridge University Press, 2025, page 13.
[2] “Our analyses used mixed-effects regression models (logistic regressions for dichotomous outcomes) with random intercepts for institutions (i.e., the colleges and universities that students attended). We fit these models using the lme4 and lmerTest packages in R (Bates et al. 2020; Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, and Christensen R. H. B. 2017), computed estimated marginal means using the emmeans package (Lenth et al. 2018), and used multiple imputation to accommodate missing data with the mice package (Buuren and Groothuis-Oudshoorn 2011). The code used in these analyses is available online (https://osf.io/4S693),” ibid, page 7.
