🎒ISEE® Upper Level

Nineteen of the forty Verbal Reasoning items are one capitalized word and four choices: meaning drawn as regions, and words assembled from their parts.

What an ISEE Synonym Question Asks · Predicting Your Own Synonym First · Meaning as a Region, Not a Point · Connotation: the Charge a Word Carries · +12 more

Twelve single-word blanks and nine paired-word blanks: signal words as arrows that set direction, and a pair that must light green on both halves.

What a Sentence Completion Measures · Reading the Whole Sentence Before the Choices · Predicting the Word Before You Look · When the Sentence Defines the Missing Word · +12 more

Six texts of 300 to 600 words in 35 minutes: what the whole thing is about, what it actually says, and the outline that builds as you read.

How the Reading Section Is Built · The Four Genres: Narrative, Expository, Persuasive, Descriptive · The Four Subject Areas: Arts, Contemporary Life, History, Science · Why Outside Knowledge Is Never Required · +9 more

The largest strand and the trickiest: a dotted box exactly one step past the facts, and a word on a dial that the sentence rotates.

Inference: One Step Beyond What Is Stated · The Over-Reach: Two Steps Too Far · Comparing and Contrasting Ideas · Interpreting and Analysing a Text · +6 more

How a text is put together and how it sounds: sequence, structure, genre, tone as a dial, and figurative language as two images laid over each other.

Sequence and Chronology · Structure and Pattern of a Whole Text · How Two Paragraphs Relate · Summarising a Text · +9 more

One prompt, thirty minutes, unscored by the test maker and read by every school: the argument as a spine with ribs that must attach to it.

What the ISEE Essay Is and Is Not · Reading a One-Sentence Prompt · Planning Inside Thirty Minutes · Building a Thesis from a Prompt · +5 more

The clock, the guessing rule, the alphabetical answer list, and how a raw Verbal Reasoning count becomes a scaled score, a percentile and a stanine.

No Penalty for a Wrong Answer · The Twenty-Minute Verbal Clock · Alphabetical Answer Choices · Unscored Items, Scaled Scores and Stanines

Word problems plus quantitative comparisons, where every wrong answer is a logical error and calculation is often beside the point.

Quantitative Reasoning vs Mathematics Achievement · Rule Generation: Items That Need No Calculation · Sorting Relevant From Irrelevant Information · The Quantitative Comparison Format · +18 more

Forty-seven achievement items aligned to NCTM grades 8 to 11, reaching second-year algebra, where every wrong choice is a process error.

Integers and Operations With Signed Numbers · Order of Operations · Factors, Multiples, Primes, GCF and LCM · Fractions, Decimals, Percents and Converting Among Them · +52 more