Need Help Deciphering Your Child’s ISEE Report?

Need help deciphering your child’s ISEE report? The Individual Student Report (ISR), which will be posted to your family’s online account several days after your child takes the ISEE exam, shows the results from your child’s exam day and some useful metrics for gauging how well they performed on the exam. Copies of the ISR are also emailed to ERB schools and consultants if you have listed them as recipients (The essay, which is NOT scored and is released ONLY to ERB schools, accompanies the ISR).

That being said, the ISR contains a LOT of information. Here’s what you can expect to see:

TEST PROFILE

The Test Profile serves as a quick look at your child’s overall performance on each of the four scored sections of the ISEE — that is, every section except the essay, which is sent unscored to each school for which you request score reports. Those four sections are (1) Verbal Reasoning, (2) Reading Comprehension, (3) Quantitative Reasoning, and (4) Mathematics Achievement.

For each scored section, your child’s scores are rated on four different metrics:  Scaled Score, Percentile Rank, Stanine, and Stanine Analysis.

Scaled Score:

Scaled scores for each section range from 760 to 940. The scaled score is derived from the raw score — the number of questions your child answered correctly — but is more useful than the raw score because the scaled score has the same meaning regardless of which form of the assessment is used. That is, ERB administers multiple versions of the test each year and the scaled score takes these slight differences into account and allows ERB to report a score on a common scale that has the same meaning for all students regardless of the form of the test that was taken.

Stanine:

A stanine score takes your child’s Percentile Rank and standardizes it on a scale from 1 to 9, with 5 as a midpoint. Stanines are derived by dividing the entire range of students’ scores into nine segments, designated as shown below:

Percentile Stanine
1-3 1
4-10 2
11-22 3
23-39 4
40-59 5
60-76 6
77-88 7
89-95 8
96-99 9

Stanine Analysis gives a more visual comparison between your child’s performance on both the ability sections and the related achievement sections. Specifically, schools will be making comparisons between Verbal Reasoning (V) and Reading Comprehension (R), and between Quantitative
Reasoning (Q) and Mathematics Achievement (M).

Percentile rank shows your child’s standing when compared to other students in the norm group for this exam. The rank is based on scores obtained from all students in a given grade who have taken the test over the past three years. This is out of a total of 99 percentile points.

So for example, if your child earns a percentile rank of 75 for the Verbal Reasoning section, that means that they scored as well as or higher than 75% of all the students in the norm group, and lower than 24% for that section.

ANALYSIS

The Analysis portion of your child’s ISEE report shows question-by-question, section-by-section, how your child did on the ISEE. This part breaks down each scored section of the exam into subsections that are based on the type of question, then lists for each subsection the number of questions, the number of questions your child answered correctly, and the results for each question.

So for example, within the Verbal Reasoning scored section, you will see that there are several different subsections: Synonyms, Single Word Response, and Phrase Response. For each of those three types of questions, the ISR shows how many your child got correct out of the total questions. Then, it will list Results for Each Question, where you will see a line of symbols that corresponds to how your child answered each question:

A plus (+) sign means they answered correctly,
a minus (-) sign means they answered incorrectly,
an S indicates they skipped that question, and
an N indicates they didn’t reach that question.

Need help preparing for the ISEE? Click here to see how Boston Tutoring Services can help.