ISEE Practice Tests

Students may take the ISEE up to three times a year or once each during three 4-month periods generally corresponding to summer, fall, and winter. These 4-month periods are set by ERB; a student could not, for example, take the ISEE in both December AND January because of the limitation of taking the test only once during each prescribed period.

Let’s now assume that you are a current 7th grader looking to apply to 9th grade, which is generally the “prime entry year” for a private high school –

1. Your first opportunity to take the ISEE would be in the spring and summer during and after your 7th grade year, April through July.
2. The second opportunity would be during the fall of your 8th grade year between August and November.
3. The third and last opportunity would be during the winter of your 8th grade year between December and March.

Note that many Houston schools will not accept scores from the April to July test date. Instead, most schools see the spring testing as the 3rd opportunity primarily for students applying outside of the normal timeframe, usually the same calendar year in which they plan to enroll.

The ISEE is scored along a normal curve, which is divided into 9 slices (“stanines”), where 1 is significantly below average and 9 is outstanding. The norm group consists of students who applied for the same grade from the past 3 years; students are not compared directly to students in their current year.

​Most Houston schools will accept average scores of 4, 5, and 6, but academically rigorous schools are more likely to enroll students with scores of 7, 8, and 9.

The Upper and Middle Level ISEE is a 5-part, 2 hour and 40-minute test with two breaks lasting between 5 and 10 minutes each. The ISEE Lower Level is a 5-part, 2 hour and 20-minute test with two breaks lasting between 5 and 10 minutes each.

Students will be tested on their knowledge of vocabulary, reading, writing, and math.

High achieving students at competitive schools should have already learned most of the tested concepts by the end of their first semester in 8th grade (Upper Level) or the end of their first semester in 6th grade (Middle Level) or 4th grade (Lower Level).

However, there will be some questions that ask about concepts that students have not learned as the Upper Level ISEE is taken by students applying to grades as high as 12, the Middle Level is taken by students applying to both grades 7 and 8, and the Lower Level is taken by students applying to both grades 5 and 6.

The ISEE is both an achievement and a reasoning test. Achievement tests strive simply to determine if a student has learned something they were taught. A reasoning test goes a step further to determine if a student can leverage what they were taught to reason their way through related but new and novel concepts.

To this extent, there are four, scored sections of the ISEE – two that test reading and vocabulary skills (Verbal Reasoning and Reading Comprehension) and two that test math skills (Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematics Achievement).