When applying to a competitive high school, it is absolutely necessary to show that a young student has strong verbal reasoning abilities. While it is impossible to assess all such skills in a single fell swoop, the ISEE makes a valiant effort to provide potential school application boards with adequate metrics of young students’ verbal skills. These are tested by two primary sections: the Verbal Reasoning section and the Reading Comprehension section.

The Verbal Reasoning section of the ISEE examination could be considered a type of “discrete reasoning.” That is, it tests certain enumerable interpretive abilities and explicit knowledge of vocabulary items. The interpretive breadth is far less expansive on these questions, for they aim to test only two aspects of the young student’s verbal abilities, namely his or her vocabulary acquisition and his or her verbal inferential skills.

The broad acquisition of vocabulary is a necessity for success on the ISEE Verbal Reasoning section, particularly in its Upper Level form. This exam presupposes that the young student has acquired a significant battery of vocabulary terms and that he or she is able to apply those words to problems asking for the identification of synonymous terms as well as in questions that ask him or her to complete sentences using said vocabulary. In an era in which lengthy reading is perhaps less common, a high score on this section of the ISEE can indicate to admissions boards that your young student has not foregone a deep involvement with the English language and that he or she has the vocabulary capacity needed for an expressive engagement with literature and self-communication.

Beyond vocabulary skills, this section also tests the inferential abilities of students, particularly when confronted with sentences that are in need of verbal completion. A true command of the English language—as well as a generally developed sense of the semantics of sentential structure—is well evidenced by a student’s ability to examine a sentence and note its overall meaning in order to complete any missing elements in the sentence. It is generally expected that students can read basic sentences and understand them. However, knowing how to complete an incomplete sentence shows that the young student has keen verbal abilities and can comprehend complex topics in a single intellectual glance.

Skills of verbal reasoning and reading comprehension are pivotal for general academic success. Varsity Tutors’ free ISEE Upper Level Verbal flashcards can help students augment their vocabularies and gain crucial practice in attempting problems formatted like those featured on the ISEE’s Verbal section. Flashcards are organized by question type in varying levels of specificity, so you can select the set of flashcards that best addresses your student’s particular needs. Each flashcard reveals the correct answer when a one of the multiple answer choices is selected, as well as a helpful explanation that can assist your student in learning unfamiliar words and in structuring his or her approach to each problem type. With adequate preparation, the young test-taker can provide his or her potential high schools with a sure sign of such mastery by means of an excellent score on the ISEE Upper Level Verbal Reasoning section.