Princeton Review - Cracking the SSAT & ISEE, 2016 Edition

Editorial
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Aaron Riccio, Editor
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Cover art PhotoAlto / Alamy Published in the United States by Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Terms of Service: The Princeton Review Online Companion Tools (Student Tools) for the retail books are available for only the two most recent editions of that book. Student Tools may be activated only twice per eligible book purchased for two consecutive 12-month periods, for a total of 24 months of access. Activation of Student Tools more than twice per book is in direct violation of these Terms of Service and may result in discontinuation of access to Student Tools Services. eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-2640-3
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-2629-8 SSAT is a registered trademark of the Secondary School Admission Test
Board, and ISEE is a registered trademark of the Educational Records
Bureau, neither of which sponsors nor endorses this product.

The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University. Editor: Aaron Riccio
Production Editor: Beth Hanson
Production Artist: Keren Peysakh 2016 Edition v3.1

The Princeton Review would like to thank David Stoll and V. Zoe Gannon for their hard work revising and developing test material for this book. Congratulations! Your child is considering attending a private secondary school, and by virtue of the fact that you hold this book in your hands, you have recognized that either the SSAT or the ISEE is an important part of the admissions process. Providing your child with the information contained in this book is an excellent first step toward a strong performance on the SSAT or the ISEE.

As a parent, however, you know well the fine line between support and intrusion. To guide you in your efforts to help your child, we offer a few suggestions.

Both the SSAT and the ISEE are standardized tests designed to say something about an individual students chances for success in a private secondary school. Neither is an intelligence test; neither claims to be. Set realistic expectations for your child. The skills necessary for a strong performance on these tests are very different from those a student uses in school.

The additional stress that comes from being expected to do well generally serves only to distract a student from taking a test efficiently. At the same time, beware of dismissing disappointing results with a simple, My child doesnt test well. While it is undoubtedly true that some students test better than others, this explanation does little to encourage a student to invest time and effort into overcoming obstacles and improving his or her performance. Be Informed The SSAT and the ISEE
are neither achievement
tests nor intelligence tests.
To score well, your child
needs to understand
what is tested and how
it is tested.

Both the SSAT and the ISEE use the same test to measure the performance of an eighth-grade student and an eleventh-grade student. It is impossible to interpret scores without considering the grade level of the student.

Percentile rankings have much more value than do either raw or scaled scores, and percentiles are the numbers schools use to compare students.

There are both verbal and math questions on the SSAT and on the ISEE. However, these questions are often based on skills and concepts that are different from those used on a day-to-day basis in school. For instance, very few English teachersat any levelspend a lot of time teaching students how to do analogies or sentence completion questions. This may be frustrating for parents, students, and teachers. But in the final judgment, our educational system would take a turn for the worse if it attempted to teach students to do well on the SSAT, the ISEE, or even the SAT.

The fact that the valuable skills students learn in school dont directly improve test scores is evidence of a flaw in the testing system, not an indictment of our schools or those who have devoted their professional careers to education.