If your child has just taken the ISEE, the score report you get back can be confusing. There are four sections, three different scores per section, a separate analysis block, an essay that doesn't get scored at all, and a percentile rank that doesn't mean what most parents think it means. None of it is hard to understand once you know what you're looking at, but the report assumes a familiarity with testing terminology that many families don’t have.
Here's what each piece of the report actually means, which numbers admissions offices care about most, and what's competitive for the major Dallas-area schools.
01The sections, briefly
The ISEE has four scored sections and one unscored essay. The four scored sections are Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Mathematics Achievement. Verbal Reasoning tests a student's vocabulary and their ability to reason through context. Quantitative Reasoning is intended to measure underlying thinking ability through logic and math based problem-solving. Reading Comprehension evaluates a student’s ability to read, analyze, and synthesize information. Lastly, Mathematics Achievement measures mastery of material the student has been taught in school.
The essay is sent to each school that receives the score report, but it is not graded or scored. Schools read it themselves and decide what to make of it.
02The three scores per section
For each of the four scored sections, the report shows three numbers, and understanding the difference can be a little tricky.
The scaled score on each section ranges from 760 to 940. It's a converted version of the raw score (the number of questions answered correctly) that adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between different versions of the test. On its own, the scaled score doesn't tell you much. It's the input that gets converted into the other two scores. Don't worry too much about this score: the schools you’re applying to don't care about it directly.
The percentile rank ranges from 1 to 99 and tells you how your child performed compared to other students in the same grade who have taken the ISEE in the past three years. A percentile rank of 74 indicates your child scored as well as or better than 74% of that comparison group.
When it comes to percentile rank on the ISEE, it’s important to note that the comparison group is NOT a general population of students. It is a group of students applying to selective private schools, who have prepared for and chosen to take the ISEE. This means that the 50th percentile on the ISEE is not "the average student in America." It is "the average among already-high-achieving private school applicants", so if your child scores in the 50th percentile on the ISEE, that's a much stronger result than the number sounds like.
Finally, the stanines for each section range from 1 to 9 and are a simplified version of the percentile rank, grouped into bands. A stanine of 5 is the middle of the distribution. Stanines 4 through 6 represent the broad average range of students taking the ISEE (but remember that average on this test is as compared to good test takers). Stanines 7 through 9 represent above-average performance, with stanine 9 reserved for roughly the top 4% of test-takers. The full percentile breakdown is 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 |
If you only remember one thing from this post, remember this: the stanine is what most admissions offices look at first. Percentile ranks and scaled scores are useful, but when an admissions reader is moving through hundreds of files, the stanine is the number that gets scanned for fastest. A student applying to a competitive Dallas school should know what their stanines look like before knowing anything else about the report.
03The stanine analysis section
Below the section scores, the ISEE score report includes a stanine analysis that breaks each section down by question type, showing which kinds of questions your child got right and which they got wrong. This part of the report is most useful for understanding where to focus prep on a retake, or for getting a sense of academic strengths and weaknesses more generally, but for admissions purposes, schools rarely dig deep into this information. They're looking at the section-level stanines and percentiles.
04How schools weigh the sections
Most schools look at all four sections, but the strongest schools want to see consistent performance across the board. For example, a student who scores a stanine 9 in Quantitative Reasoning and a stanine 4 in Reading Comprehension may raise questions in a way that a student with 7s in both sections does not. As a result, it's less useful than you'd think to look at an ISEE score as "a composite of 22" by summing the stanine scores across sections.
05"Good enough" is the goal
Before getting into specific schools, here's something worth knowing, while we students score in the 99th percentile every year on the SAT and ACT, we almost never see students score that high on the ISEE. The ISEE is genuinely harder to ace than either of those tests, partly because the comparison group is already strong (which naturally deflates students' performance in relation to other standardized tests) and partly because the test asks students, especially 8th graders, to handle material that is above their grade level.
That changes how you should think about scores. "Good enough" is the real target, not "as high as possible." Once your child clears the bar for the schools on your list, additional points do not afford you anything, and you don't get to bring a friend along just because your stanines are higher than the school needed them to be. Admissions offices are checking that the student can handle the academic workload at their particular school and that the student’s overall application makes them seem like a safe fit.
All of this matters because it means that as long as you have realistic goals for your student, there is no reason to stress. A score that gets your child into a school they love fulfills its purpose, whether the stanines are 5s or 8s.
06What's competitive for Dallas-area schools
None of the major Dallas private schools publishes an official ISEE minimum, and admissions are genuinely holistic. This means that ISEE scores sit alongside your student’s GPA (the most important factor in admissions virtually everywhere), teacher recommendations, school interviews, the essay, the application itself, and - depending on the school - demonstrated interest, family fit, and available space in the grade.
With that said, there are some rough guidelines for what private schools are looking for when it comes to ISEE stanine scores. In our experience working with DFW families for over twenty years, a general outline of schools’ ISEE expectations looks roughly like this:
At the most selective schools, including Hockaday, St. Mark's, and Greenhill, admitted students usually average around a 7 stanine; however, every year these schools also admit students with one or two lower stanines, particularly when the rest of the application is strong. The average admitted student is not the same thing as the minimum admitted student, and the schools really do look at students as a whole.
At schools like the Episcopal School of Dallas, Ursuline, Jesuit, Parish Episcopal, and Trinity Christian Academy, the range of admitted scores is normally wider, often reflecting a broader set of priorities within the schools themselves. At these schools, you will see some number of students with very high stanines, but most students applying have a stanine average of around 5, with students scoring below 5s in one or more sections routinely being admitted as well, especially when the student has strong grades, a good interview, and a clear fit with the school.
The bottom line is that while stanine scores of 7 or higher keep every Dallas-area private school on the table, they are not needed at the majority of schools. Stanine scores of 5 or higher keep nearly all schools open as options as well, including some of the most selective ones (in particular when the rest of the application is strong), and even stanine scores below 4s or 5s do not necessarily exclude students from getting into good schools. The right question is not whether the score is "as high as possible" or even if it is consistent with other standardized test results (it likely isn’t), but whether the score is competitive at schools that are a good fit for your student.
07What to do with this
If you have a score report in front of you and you're trying to figure out where your child stands, start with the stanines. Look at the four numbers across the report and see if they are competitive for the schools you are interested in. If the answer is yes, you have a strong report, and your job moving forward is to make sure the rest of your student’s application also looks great. If the answer is no, prep is often worth considering, especially if the gap between current scores and target scores is something tutoring or a class could realistically close.
If you're not sure how to read what you're seeing, or if you'd like help thinking through whether prep makes sense, feel free to give us a call (214) 295-8265! We can walk you through the report, talk through your school list, and give you an honest read on what makes sense from here.
