Admissions Testing
The Overlake School requires Independent Schools Entrance Examination (ISEE) test results for all applicants.
Deadline for ISEE results
to be received by Overlake:
January 17, 2008
-
Last date to take the ISEE
in order to meet the Overlake deadline:
January 13, 2008
The following section was prepared by the Seattle/Tacoma Consortium of Independent Schools for use by its member schools:
The Seattle/Tacoma Consortium of Independent Schools, which includes Annie Wright, Bear Creek, Bellevue Children’s Academy, Bush, Charles Wright, Eastside Catholic, Eastside Prep, The Evergreen School, Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, Lakeside, Northwest, Overlake, Seattle Academy, Seattle Country Day, University Prep, Villa Academy, and Vista Academy at Open Window use the Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) for our admission test.
The ISEE ONLINE STUDENT GUIDE is available from any one of the schools requiring the test and from many Seattle-area independent elementary schools. This guide includes the form required to register for the test, describes the test in detail, and leads you to the ISEE Web site, www.iseetest.org, which provides more details and sample test questions. A list of schools that are test sites, with their dates of testing, can be found on the reverse side of this sheet.
- The REGISTRATION FEE for the ISEE is $78. If the $78 registration fee is burdensome to you, you may request a fee waiver from any school to which you are applying for admission.
- TEST EARLY: We encourage students to take the ISEE on the earliest possible test date.
- ISEE studies reveal that test scores are just as high for students who test in early fall as for those who test in winter.
- Students who test early feel less stress than those who wait.
- Students who become ill during winter flu season may not have time to reschedule. Your child may only take the ISEE once during the admission process.
INFORMATION REGARDING ISEE TEST RESULTS
We know that test results are often misunderstood and can be a source of anxiety. Test results are just one factor utilized in gaining a clear picture of each applicant and are, by no means, the sole criterion used. They serve to illuminate the school record and to provide us with a common denominator, given that the students who apply to our schools come from many different backgrounds. As educators, we are quite aware of what multiple-choice tests tell us, and of what they don’t tell us, about a student. We know that such qualities as empathy, vision, motivation, resilience, patience, sense of humor, creativity, the ability to work independently, and a whole array of other human qualities are not measured by any standardized test. A former president of Educational Testing Service, the group that devises and now administers a number of standardized tests, once said, "Tests can't assess the glint in a student's eye." We wholeheartedly agree. Rest assured all the schools in this group take many factors besides standardized test results into account in our admission decisions.
The ISEE measures both ability to learn, through the verbal and quantitative reasoning sections, and achievement (what a student has learned), through the reading comprehension and mathematics achievement sections.
You may be perplexed by the fact that the test scores on the ISEE are lower than those on previous standardized tests your child has taken. In order to understand ability or achievement test scores, you need to be familiar with the group against whom the student is being compared, i.e. the norm group. The norm group in this case is the population nationwide who are applying to independent schools, a highly competitive population. To illustrate the significance of the different norms, a student's reading score at the 87th percentile level on a National Norm might equate to the 50th percentile on the Independent School Norm.
Although test results may be helpful to you, we urge you to use your own best judgement in deciding whether to share these results with your child. Our concern focuses on the educational appropriateness of students discussing their ISEE results with their peers. In a majority of cases, the ISEE results will show a similar pattern to scores on previous ERB or other standardized tests.
Please call any of us with questions or concerns. The web site address for ISEE is www.iseetest.org. If your child requires testing accommodations please contact ISEE for locations of test sites that offer accommodations