Rob Franek - Cracking the SSAT & ISEE

Neither is an intelligence test; neither claims to be. 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. 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.

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 approach analogy 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.