Can someone explain ISEB to me?

My DS due to sit ISEB shortly and Atom has been really good for him, he prefers the online testing. However he also has a paper based exam in January. Should I stick with Atom or just practice with the books? He's not so good with the books and want to ensure he's good with all formats. Need to decide whether to renew Atom for another month

Interesting - but do you know a parents or as the children have a right to see what stains held on you?
I guess it makes sense.

I am also concerned that we have banding tests for state tests clashing with iseb tests for private schools.

I am unsure what to do in that scenario.

@Stircrazyschoolmum we have 3 schools running with ISEB, and one non ISEB, however due to a clash with dates and an early cut off, school offered to run ISEB early.

@whyohwhy I don't think so. Secondary schools have to fill in a request form for access to candidates results to be sent to them by email from the ISEB according to their website. On this basis I can't imagine that the host primary school or parents will be able to obtain the data. The data owners are the secondary school who have preregistered the candidates and paid for the service.

Goodluck @GrammarHopeful - i found this part strangely calm and nerve wrcking.

Hi after this testing process can you as a parent see the results and the detailed results ? Thanks

Dropped DS for his ISEB pre-test just now. He seemed quietly confident after clearing the Sutton grammars test, so hopefully that will translate to good performance today and generates some good options for now (we have three schools that use ISEB this year on our list).

Does anyone know if spatial reasoning (3D) is included in the real ISEB NVR ?
Thank you

Regarding prep school children having an advantage as they sit the test over two days... Yes by definition this test is unfair as it is taken at different dates over different settings, unlike traditional exams. However it is also unfair for prep school children as they tend to sit the test earlier in November, up to 1-2 months before others sitting the test at the secondary schools. 1-2 months of extra preparation adds WAY MORE to the overall score than 1-2 months of age standardisation which is peanuts. Those sitting the test later also have the advantage of benefiting from the feedback from those who sat the test earlier.

Saw an ISEB youtube video about the pre-test and it seems like the schools gets a pretty detailed report on the scores (score, stanine, percentile and ranking of the cohort).

I heard that some prep's adminster the tests over 2 days - surely this gives those DC a minor advantage? - only needing to focus/concentrate for slightly over an hour versus those doing all four sections in one sitting.

I am pleased relieved DS had completed ISEB. DS was delighted to say the style was the same as Atom, but he didn’t feel the questions ever became as difficult as the random nor as technical As Atom. English And VR were relatively easier than he had expected. Atom does expose you to questions far beyond the curriculum.
I did overhear that the school / invigilators can access the results 10 days/ 2 weeks after the exam. I would be curious to see if this is in-fact true or an urban legend .. Has anyone else heard this?

They definitely do know the timings. When DS sat ISEB a couple of years ago one of the schools that offered him a place told me his overall score wasn't what they'd usually expect as he'd done poorly in one section but got outstanding scores in others and had done the whole thing in under half the allocated time. He got interviews at all of the schools we applied for so I assume the others must also have looked beyond the overall score. We were applying to very selective schools and most had their own second round tests so were really only using ISEB as a first sift which may have made them more willing to look at those who got odd or spikey results.

I think the info about time is provided to the schools, per ISEB website. I do not know whether it makes a difference to the scores but I had assumed not. I think that whether it is relevant depends on the school and what they are looking for. E.g. in a very selective school, between a handful of borderline candidates and all other things being equal, it could be important.

I think it’s unlikely schools get told the time taken to complete each section and even more unlikely they would take this metric into account.
IMO the time taken to complete the test is irrelevant - there are several reasons why DC can complete a test before the allocated time: rushing carelessly, rushing as being very gifted, or on the contrary, not taking the time to work out some questions/having no clue and guessing the answers. Therefore no meaningful conclusion can be drawn from it.
In addition taking this information into account would be over complicating (an already complicated) decision making process.
If time was important, it would be somehow included in the score/taken into account to generate the next questions through a very clever algorithm!

Does anyone know if time is a factor in the standardised scoring or if the schools are told of the time taken by the child for each individual section?

For example, the Maths section is 50 mins. If the child finished the test in half the time and scored, say 125, is this considered a negative (good score, but clearly rushed it needlessly) or positive (good score and only needed half the allocated time).

Candidates from state schools and independent schools will be sitting the test at the same time in the same place. I fail to see how they will be sitting a different test

The ISEB pretest is exactly the same for all the schools. What does vary is the cut off mark which will be different for every school. The most selective schools will have the highest cut off marks to qualify for the next step and so on...

@OptimysticMom

Are you saying that the ISEB pre-test varies according to which school you are at/from? I was under the impression everyone, whether they were from a prep or a state school took the same pre-test in the sense it was from the same set of question banks and was adaptive (predominantly on the maths) in terms of level of difficulty.

As to your statement that "its not difficult to chosen for your selected school", I think this depends on how competitive the school is.

My DS used Atom for a month and found it about 70% similar to the actual ISEB. He said Atom was harder on English and tested numerous aspects that didn't appear in the actual pre-test. The actual test was harder in VR and Maths.

I didn't actually delete my post, someone else must have done. Anyway, I guess my main point was, my son didn't find it super similar to atom in the end. Atom is expensive, so I thought it worth mentioning. For us, considering how totally unprepared he would have been without it, with extremely patchy schooling and this being his first proper test of any description (and as he liked computer-based practice), it was still a good resource. But if we were to do it again, I probably would have used more regular 11+ preparation resources. I think Oceane is right also that being too used to one platform could be a disadvantage. Good luck to everyone's children!

@GrammarHopeful Exactly the same for DD The ONLY topic where she has a relatively poor ability score is 3D shapes in NVR!