Kaplan SSAT & ISEE 2009 Edition: For Private and Independent School Admissions,   ISBN:9781419552243

Customer Rating: 

Gave the lower level practice test to my 5th grade daughter. I should of checked the questions, especially the reading comprehension first. Turns out that the questions were inaccurate as far as authentic ssat questions go. I compared them to the official [...] test and the Kaplan questions turned out to be too hard for lower level. My daughter was in tears. Will not buy Kaplan material anymore.

Customer Rating: 

I am a tutor, and I've worked with this book for years. The SSAT and the ISEE both have official guides to the test (which are only available on their own websites, as far as I'm aware), and those are valuable, but contain little in the way of test-taking strategy and in-depth question & answer analysis. For that, you need a third-party test prep book.

I generally recommend this book for SSAT/ISEE test-takers who need extra practice with math. Kaplan isn't quite as good with verbal practice as the Princeton Review book is (though it's still adequate), but they have far more math practice problems, and their chapters contain a lot of good math strategies.

In fact, nearly every strategy in this book is based on an algorithm. Even the "bridge"-based analogies strategy involves following a sequence of steps for every problem. There are a lot of students for whom that works very well.

I'm giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 because, as I said, the book doesn't do quite as well at verbal practice as the Princeton Review. But it does some things better. If they ever pair up and co-publish one book, *that* will be the perfect ISEE/SSAT prep book.

But until then, I'll keep recommending that most of my students buy both books.

Customer Rating: 

My son's school offers an SSAT review course and specifically recommended this book.
It seems to offer a very good review for the high school entrance exam.

Customer Rating: 

My daughter bought this guide and the Princeton Review's guide when she had only a month to prepare for the SSAT. She found Kaplan's practice tests useful for diagnosing areas she needed to focus on (particularly in math) but after trying both guides, she decided that she liked the PR much better both for it's explanations and links to real world results (Having an even rough approximation of how you will do on the real test is better than no feedback at all). It may be that Kaplan is equal to or even better than PR for ISEE prep. We only had time to do the SSAT portions.