The ISEE Upper Level:
a complete guide

Who sits it, and when

Your child is in eighth grade or above and applying for a high school place, frequently in the same autumn as the SHSAT or the TACHS, which is three admissions tests in one season.

The ISEE Upper Level is 160 scored questions in 130 minutes across four sections, plus a handwritten essay at the end that carries no score.

Section	Questions	Time	Per question
Verbal Reasoning	40	20 min	30 sec
Quantitative Reasoning	37	35 min	57 sec
Reading Comprehension	36	35 min	58 sec
Mathematics Achievement	47	40 min	51 sec
Total	160	130 min

The one thing that separates this level

Upper Level covers applicants to grades 9 through 12 with a single paper. A student applying for grade 9 sits exactly the same exam as one applying for grade 11.

That is only fair because of how the scoring works. The percentile compares your child against other candidates of the same grade, so a ninth-grade applicant is not measured against eleventh-graders even though they sat the same questions. Families who see the shared paper and panic about the age range have misread which part does the adjusting.

Once per season, three seasons

The ISEE may be sat once in each testing season, and there are three: Fall runs August to November, Winter December to March, and Spring or Summer April to July. Three sittings in twelve months is the ceiling, and it is one per season rather than three whenever you like.

Upper Level candidates most often sit in the autumn, and it is the same autumn as the SHSAT for New York City families. Sitting both within a few weeks is normal and manageable; sitting both in the same two weeks as the TACHS is where families start making mistakes about which test they are preparing for.

Planning the sitting

Upper Level in New York City lands in the same autumn as the SHSAT and, for some families, the TACHS as well. Three admissions tests in three months is survivable, but only if you decide in advance which one matters most, because the preparation for them is not interchangeable. The SHSAT has grid-in mathematics and no quantitative comparison; the ISEE has the reverse.

The percentile is not what parents think it is

This is the single most misread thing about the ISEE. Your child's percentile does not compare them against children their age. It compares them against other students who sat the same test at the same level over the past three years, and those students are, by definition, families applying to independent schools.

At Upper Level the norm group is other high school applicants of the same grade over three years, so a ninth-grade applicant is compared against ninth-grade applicants even though the paper is shared with older students. A child who is comfortably top of their class can land near the middle of that group and be doing perfectly well. Parents who read a 50th percentile as average-for-a-child are reading it wrong by a wide margin, and some of them conclude their child should not apply.

Stanines are what the school actually reads

Alongside the percentile, each section gets a stanine from 1 to 9, with 5 as the midpoint. Admissions offices tend to read the stanine first, and there is a good reason for that: it bands the results, so a one-point difference in percentile between two candidates does not look like a difference at all.

Upper Level stanines carry the most weight of the three, because there is more competition for high school places and admissions offices are reading more files. A 7 and an 8 are read as different; a 71st and a 74th percentile are not. Chasing a few percentile points is usually chasing nothing: moving from a 5 to a 6 is a real change, and moving from the 58th to the 62nd percentile is typically invisible to the person reading the file.

The essay is unscored and it still gets read

The ISEE ends with a handwritten essay on a set prompt. ERB does not mark it. It is copied and sent to every school your family nominates, where an admissions officer reads it as a sample of your child's unedited writing.

At high school level the unscored essay is read more closely than at any other level, because there is more riding on the application and less other writing in the file. It goes to every school you nominate, unmarked and unedited, in your child's handwriting.

We should be straight about our own product here. Our practice exams cover the four scored sections and we do not set an essay. That part needs practicing somewhere else, and a family who assumes we have covered it will be assuming wrong.

What to work on first

The algebra, if it is shaky. Fourteen of the 168 mathematics and quantitative items across our two Upper Level forms solve for an unknown, use an exponent or work with slope. That is a small share of the paper and the entire difference between this level and the one below it.

ISEE or SSAT?

Many independent schools accept either, and the honest answer is that the choice rarely matters as much as families expect. The ISEE has quantitative comparison at the Middle and Upper levels and the SSAT has a guessing penalty, which is the difference most worth knowing: on the ISEE nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so every question should carry one.

At Upper Level many New York families are choosing between the ISEE, the SSAT and the SHSAT in the same autumn. The SHSAT is not an alternative to the other two: it admits only to the specialized public high schools and no independent school accepts it. Check what each school on your list accepts before choosing, and if they all take both, pick the one your child has practice material for and stop deliberating.

What we found when we tested our own exam

An eighth-grader preparing for the SHSAT and the ISEE at once has no spare hours, so a practice test that returns a number nobody has validated is not just useless, it is displacing the preparation that would have worked.

So we measure it. Across the 24 sections of our ISEE exams long enough to measure (894 questions, in sections of 20 or more), the best score any length-based strategy reaches is 40%, against the 25% that guessing alone should give. Four strategies are scored: pick the longest option, pick the shortest, cross off the longest and guess, cross off the shortest and guess.

Upper Level carries the algebraic items, which tend to have short numerical options, so the risk on this level runs toward a short-answer tell rather than a long one. Both directions are scored.

That figure is produced from the live question bank by the same script that fails our build if any section crosses 40%, and it covers all three levels together because they draw on one bank. The first time we ran it across everything we sell it flagged 46 sections and 1,741 questions, and the worst section could be beaten 91% of the time. Fixing them meant rewriting wrong answers one at a time, keeping each one's explanation true to it, and it took weeks.

Where to practice

We publish two full ISEE Upper Level forms with no questions shared between them, so a second sitting measures learning instead of memory, and you can sit a single section when that is all you have time for. Every wrong answer carries its own explanation saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, which is the part that turns a score into something you can act on. There is a free sample on the samples page if you want to see the format before paying for anything.

Go deeper with our guides on what is on the ISEE Upper Level, Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Reading and Mathematics Achievement. If you are not sure which level applies, start here.

Common questions

How many questions are on the ISEE Upper Level?

160 scored multiple-choice questions in 130 minutes across four sections, plus an unscored essay. Verbal Reasoning has 40, Quantitative Reasoning 37, Reading Comprehension 36 and Mathematics Achievement 47.

How many times can you take the ISEE?

Once per testing season, and there are three seasons in the year: Fall from August to November, Winter from December to March, and Spring or Summer from April to July. That is a maximum of three sittings in twelve months.

What is a stanine on the ISEE?

A score from 1 to 9 with 5 as the midpoint, reported for each section. It is the figure most admissions offices read first, because it compresses the percentile into a band and discourages reading too much into small differences.

Who is my child being compared against?

Other students who sat the same test at the same age over the past three years. That is a group of independent school applicants, not children in general, which is why a percentile here looks lower than the same child's score on a school test.

Which grades sit the ISEE Upper Level?

Applicants to grades 9 through 12, which in practice means a student in eighth grade or above.