How to use an ISEE Middle Level practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The ISEE Middle Level is four timed sections for applicants to grades 7 and 8, plus an essay that carries no score and is still sent to every school on your list. Middle Level is where quantitative comparison arrives, and it is nearly half the Quantitative Reasoning section.

The mistake that ruins the result

Using Upper Level material because it looks identical. Middle and Upper have the same four sections, the same counts and the same clocks, and different content: zero of 168 Middle Level mathematics and quantitative items use algebraic notation, and the Upper forms have fourteen.

How to sit it

130 minutes, four sections, clocks enforced, in one sitting. The essay at the end of the real exam is not in ours, so add thirty minutes of handwriting practice separately rather than pretending it is covered.

What to do the day after

Look at Quantitative Reasoning first. Seventeen of its 37 questions are Column A against Column B, and marks lost there are usually lost to the format rather than the arithmetic.

What a practice test owes you

An ISEE result is a stanine from 1 to 9 and a percentile against other independent school applicants over three years, so a practice mark out of 160 compares to nothing. The reasons behind the wrong answers are the part that transfers.

Our ISEE bank holds 894 questions and 2,682 wrong answers, and every one of those wrong answers carries its own sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking. Not one is left bare, and a build of our site fails if that stops being true. On the ISEE Middle Level the reasons matter most in Verbal Reasoning, where 20 synonym questions turn on knowing a word and being told which one you missed is the whole lesson.

We also measure whether the paper can be beaten without being read. On our ISEE exams the best any length-based strategy scores is 40%, against the 25% that pure guessing gives. A practice test where picking the longest option beats guessing is measuring the person who wrote it, not your child.

A practice sitting at this level is mostly a check on whether the child has been given the right material. Half the families we hear from have been working from Upper Level papers.

Where to sit one

We publish two full ISEE Middle Level forms with no questions shared between them, and you can sit a single section when that is all the evening allows. A free sample is on the samples page, and it needs no account.

More on this exam: the full ISEE Middle Level guide, what is on it, which level applies.

Common questions

How long should a ISEE Middle Level practice test take?

130 minutes across four sections for the ISEE Middle Level, plus a thirty-minute essay on the real exam that we do not set.

Should a ISEE Middle Level practice test be timed?

Yes, section by section. Verbal Reasoning at 30 seconds a question is the tightest clock on the paper and cannot be rehearsed any other way.

Is the score the useful part of a ISEE Middle Level practice test?

No, the reasons are. Every one of the 2,682 wrong answers in our ISEE bank carries a sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, and for ISEE Middle Level that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.

How often should we sit a ISEE Middle Level practice test?

Once per testing season at most, because that is how often the real ISEE can be sat. Three sittings in a year is the ceiling and there is no reason to practice more often than you can test.