This course prepares students for the Upper Level ISEE with a structured program that starts with diagnosis and ends with full mock exams and a personalized final review plan. It is designed for students entering grades 9–12 who need targeted support for independent-school admissions testing.
Instruction covers the full exam, including Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Mathematics Achievement, and the Essay. The course emphasizes both underlying academic skills and test-specific execution, so students do more than memorize shortcuts.
- Diagnostic and readiness mapping: students begin with a baseline assessment, analyze results by subskill, set score goals, and build a mistake log to track weak areas over time.
- Test structure and strategy: students learn timing, scoring, pacing, elimination, and section-by-section expectations so the format becomes predictable and manageable.
- Verbal Reasoning: students strengthen advanced vocabulary, context clues, roots, prefixes, suffixes, sentence completion logic, tone, and precision of meaning.
- Quantitative Reasoning: students practice number properties, ratios, proportional reasoning, algebraic relationships, patterns, quantitative comparisons, data interpretation, and efficient reasoning methods.
- Mathematics Achievement: students review arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, functions, geometry, measurement, probability, statistics, and multi-step problem solving.
- Reading Comprehension: students learn how to identify main idea, supporting details, inference, tone, author purpose, structure, and vocabulary in context across literary and informational passages.
- Essay writing: students plan and write timed responses with clear thesis statements, organized body paragraphs, specific examples, controlled language, and quick revision routines.
- Practice and review: students complete timed drills, cumulative quizzes, section practice, full-length mock tests, and structured error analysis to improve both accuracy and pacing.
Lessons are built around concrete skill development. Students work through concept explanations, worked examples, guided practice, independent practice, common mistakes, original exam-style questions, full answer explanations, short quizzes, cumulative review, and timed drills. They also maintain a systematic error log so missed questions lead to clear next steps.
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Understand the Upper Level ISEE format, scoring, and pacing demands.
- Answer verbal questions using context, morphology, logic, and tone rather than guesswork.
- Solve quantitative and mathematics problems accurately across major tested topics.
- Read passages actively and support answers with textual evidence.
- Write a clear, organized, mature timed essay in response to an admissions prompt.
- Review mistakes systematically and follow a focused weak-area improvement plan.
The result is a practical preparation sequence that helps students improve content mastery, reasoning quality, time management, and confidence before test day.