Scott played an important role in Cambridge changing the rules for its famous Mathematical Tripos exam.

In 1922, James Harkness remarked that Scott's achievement marked "the turning point in England from the theoretical feminism of Mill and others to the practical education and political advances of the present time".

[5] Her book An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry was published in 1894 and reprinted thirty years later.

[3] She is also credited with being the author of the first mathematical research paper written in the US that was widely recognised in Europe, "A Proof of Noether's Fundamental Theorem" (Mathematische Annalen, Vol.

[3][7] She was one of only four women to attend the inaugural International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1897; the other three were Iginia Massarini, Vera von Schiff, and Charlotte Wedell.

Scott maintained the view that personal conservatism was a requirement to promote women's educational and political equality.

[2] She was a staunch supporter of rigour in women's classes, writing in a letter to Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas: I am most disturbed and disappointed at present to find you taking the position that intellectual pursuits must be "watered down" to make them suitable for women, and that a lower standard must be adopted at a woman's college than in a man's.

She retired in 1924, but stayed an extra year in Bryn Mawr to help her eighth doctoral student complete her dissertation before she returned to and settled in Cambridge.