One-on-one SSAT prep with me, Nico, at your home or online. The SSAT is a vocabulary-and-analogies test with a quirk most families don't know about: wrong answers cost a quarter point, skipped ones cost nothing. Both halves — the words and the when-to-skip judgment — are learnable, and we train them side by side.
The SSAT is the entrance exam favored by boarding schools and accepted by most independent schools. Your child takes the Middle Level (applying to grades 6–8) or Upper Level (applying to grades 9–12), and scores come back as percentiles, 1–99 — compared against other applicants of the same grade (not the general population).
Its personality is verbal: synonyms and analogies reward a systematically built vocabulary, and the quarter-point guessing penalty rewards judgment. The writing sample isn't scored, but schools still receive it, so we practice it.
The same backbone as my ISEE prep: diagnostic first, a target score for each school, and weekly timed practice tuned for the SSAT's verbal weight and its guessing penalty.
Roots, word families, and spaced review — not a stack of flashcards the night before. The verbal section is won weeks in advance.
The quarter-point penalty has a right answer: eliminate two choices and guess; eliminate none and skip. We drill it until the judgment is automatic.
Unscored doesn't mean unread — admissions officers see it exactly as written. We practice it under time like everything else.
Most LA independent schools accept either, so we pick the test that fits your child: the SSAT leans on vocabulary and analogies, the ISEE leans harder on math.
A short diagnostic of each usually makes the choice obvious. Whichever it is, the prep method is the same one my ISEE families use: diagnostic, target, weekly timed practice, regular practice tests.
On the SSAT, a wrong answer costs a quarter point while a skipped question costs nothing — so knowing when to skip is a real, learnable skill.
We train it explicitly: eliminate two choices and guessing pays; can't eliminate any and skipping wins. Students stop leaving points on the table in both directions.
As percentiles from 1 to 99: your child compared against other independent-school applicants of the same grade from the past three years.
That's a competitive pool, so a middling-sounding percentile is stronger than it looks. The diagnostic shows where your child starts against the schools on your list.
There are standard test dates roughly monthly through the school year, plus flexible dates — most applicants test in the fall or early winter of their application year.
We plan a primary date with one in reserve, and build the 12–20 week prep block backward from it.