The ISEE, Explained

What the ISEE is

The Independent School Entrance Examination is the admission test used by many independent (private) schools in the United States and abroad. It is produced and administered by the Educational Records Bureau (ERB), a non-profit membership organization of schools.

It is a reasoning and achievement test, not an IQ test and not a school-subject exam. Four multiple-choice sections are scored, and an unscored essay is sent to schools alongside the scores. Nothing on it is negatively marked, so there is never a reason to leave a question blank.

Which level your child takes

The level is set by the grade your child is applying to, not the grade they are in now. This trips up almost every family the first time.

A consequence worth internalizing: at every level, the students taking the same test span two applying grades (or four, at Upper Level). A child applying to grade 7 sits the same Middle Level test as a child applying to grade 8. Scores are normed by grade, so the younger applicant is not penalized for it — but the questions themselves are not made easier for them.

Our vocabulary section adds a Basic word set that is not an ERB level. It is a foundation list for younger or newer English learners building toward Lower Level.

Format and timing

The sections always appear in the same order: Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, a five-minute break, Reading Comprehension, Mathematics Achievement, a second five-minute break, then the essay. Knowing the order matters more than it sounds — the hardest-to-pace section comes first, when nerves are highest.

Lower Level (applying to grades 5–6)

Middle and Upper Level (applying to grades 7–12)

The two levels share the same structure and timing; the content difficulty differs.

Primary levels (applying to grades 2–4)

Extended-time and other accommodations are available with documentation, arranged through ERB in advance — not on test day. Start that paperwork early.

The Verbal Reasoning section

Verbal Reasoning is the section this site is built around, because it is the one where preparation reliably moves the score. It has two question types:

• Synonyms. One word, four choices, pick the closest in meaning. There is no context to help — you either know the word or you reason from its roots, prefixes and suffixes.
• Sentence completion. A sentence with a blank and four choices. Upper Level sentences may have two blanks; Lower Level sometimes omits a whole phrase rather than a single word. The wrong choices usually fit the grammar perfectly and the meaning not at all.

ERB publishes the section total but not a fixed split between the two types; in practice it runs close to half and half. Two strategies that pay off immediately:

• Answer the sentence before you read the choices. Cover them, fill the blank in your own words, then find the choice nearest your word. This defeats the distractors, which are designed to look plausible only once you have read them.
• Use roots when the word is unfamiliar. Knowing that bene- is good and mal- is bad eliminates two choices in seconds, and on a 30-second question, eliminating two choices is most of the work.

Take a timed Verbal Reasoning practice test → or work through the vocabulary list →

Scoring: scaled, percentile, stanine

Every score report shows the same four multiple-choice sections three different ways, and the three are constantly confused for each other.

1. Raw score — the number of questions answered correctly. One point per correct answer, zero for wrong or blank. No deduction for wrong answers.
2. Scaled score, 760–940 — the raw score converted onto a fixed scale so that the same scaled score means the same thing across different versions of the test. This is the only one of the three that says anything about your child in isolation.
3. Percentile rank, 1–99 — how the scaled score compares with the norm group: all students in the same grade who took the ISEE in the past three years.
4. Stanine, 1–9 — the percentile compressed into nine bands, with 5 as the midpoint. This is the number most admission committees actually read.

How percentiles map to stanines

Two things follow from that table. First, the middle bands are wide and the outer bands are narrow: moving from the 40th to the 59th percentile does not change the stanine at all, while a few questions near the top can move a child from stanine 8 to 9. Second, because stanines 4 to 6 hold the majority of test takers, a report that looks flat across sections is usually a normal report, not a problem.

There is no single "ISEE total score" that schools rank by, and no official pass mark. Competitive schools commonly talk about stanines of 7 and up, but the only reliable answer to "what score do we need" comes from the schools themselves.

The essay

The essay comes last, takes 30 minutes, and responds to a single assigned prompt — usually a personal or reflective question, not a literary analysis. It is not scored. An unedited copy goes to each school you designate, and each school evaluates it by its own criteria.

Not being scored makes it easy to dismiss, which is a mistake: it is the one piece of writing in the whole application that a school knows the child produced alone, in 30 minutes, with no help. Handwriting legibility, a clear structure, and finishing the last paragraph all matter more than vocabulary fireworks.

Test dates and retakes

A student may test once per testing season, up to three times per admission cycle. The cycle runs August 1 to July 31, and the three seasons are:

• Fall — August through November
• Winter — December through March
• Spring / Summer — April through July

So a family aiming at January application deadlines realistically has a Fall attempt and a Winter attempt — two shots, not three. Plan the calendar backwards from the earliest deadline on your list, not forwards from today.

Registering

Registration is done through a family ERB account. Practical points, in the order they bite:

• Create the account before you need it. Registration, accommodation requests and score-recipient selection all live in the same account, and setting it up under deadline pressure is how details get missed.
• Popular sites and dates fill up, particularly in the weeks before January deadlines. Book as soon as the season opens.
• Test format options — at a school, at a testing site, or a remotely proctored session at home — vary by season and region. Check what is actually offered for your dates rather than assuming last year's options.
• You do not have to name every school at registration. Score recipients can be added later from your account, and reports are sent automatically to any school already listed.
• Fees vary by format and are published by ERB; fee waivers exist and are generally arranged through a school. Ask — schools rarely volunteer this.

ERB's own family pages are the authority on dates, fees and policy, and all of it can change between admission cycles. Verify anything date- or fee-specific there before you rely on it.

ISEE vs. SSAT

Both are admission tests for independent schools, and many schools accept either. The differences that affect preparation:

The guessing rule is the difference that changes test-day behaviour most, and it is the one most often carried over incorrectly from one test to the other. Vocabulary study transfers between the two almost completely — the words are the same words.

Five costly mistakes

1. Preparing for the wrong level. The level follows the applying grade, not the current grade.
2. Practising untimed. A student who can answer every question in 45 seconds cannot finish Verbal Reasoning. Speed is a separate skill from knowledge, and it only develops under a clock.
3. Leaving answers blank. There is no penalty for a wrong answer on the ISEE. A blank is a guaranteed zero; a guess is not.
4. Cramming vocabulary in the final fortnight. Word knowledge is the most preparable part of this test and the least crammable. Twenty words a day for four months beats four hundred words in a week, and the research on spacing is not close.
5. Reading the percentile as a class rank. The comparison group is other ISEE takers in the same grade over three years — not the general population.

How to prepare

A workable plan, in order of return on effort:

1. Take one timed section cold. Before any studying, so you know what you are fixing. Start with Verbal Reasoning →
2. Build vocabulary daily, in small doses. A short daily session with spaced review beats long weekend sessions. Work from the level your child will actually sit: the word list is organized by level →
3. Review every miss to the word, not the answer. Getting a question right second time proves nothing; knowing the word does. Each word on this site has its own page with the definition, an example sentence and its synonyms for exactly this.
4. Add timing pressure deliberately. Once accuracy is decent, practise at 30 seconds per verbal question until that pace feels ordinary.
5. Rehearse the whole sitting once. Nearly three hours of concentration is its own skill, and the first time should not be the real test.

FAQ

More guides are being added to this page over time. This one is written from ERB's published test information plus what families most often ask; it is not affiliated with ERB, and ERB's own materials take precedence wherever the two differ.