ISEE Essay:An Unscored 30-Minute Essay Sent to Schools

The essay’s place in the test and its rules

This section explains which students write the essay, how much time they have and where the essay goes. The ISEE essay does not produce a score, but it is sent unchanged to school admission offices, so these rules determine how to prepare.

Item	Official rule
Levels that include the essay	Lower Level (applying to grades 5–6), Middle Level (applying to grades 7–8), Upper Level (applying to grades 9–12)
Levels without the essay	Primary 2 / 3 / 4 (applying to grades 2–4) have no writing section
Prompts and time	1 prompt, 30 minutes
Position in the test	The final section, after the four scored sections and two breaks
Scored	No; the score report contains no essay score
Response format	Typed in the online format; handwritten in the paper format; at-home testing is offered only online
Where the essay goes	The schools selected by the parents to receive scores receive a copy of the essay; families do not receive a copy

Source: official ERB ISEE materials.

Two of these rules call for particular attention from parents:

1. The essay comes at the very end of the test. At all three levels, students have already completed four scored sections before they begin writing, and their concentration has usually declined. A student who practices essays only when fresh will usually perform below the practice level on test day.
2. Parents cannot see the essay after the test. The student’s writing level can be judged only from timed essays written during practice.

How schools use the essay

This section explains why the essay is worth preparing even though it is not scored. In its official articles, ERB lists several aspects schools consider when reading the essay:

• Whether the student can express ideas clearly;
• The student’s command of English grammar and spelling;
• The personal ideas and values the writing reveals.

The official materials also explain that because the essay is completed under supervision, many schools compare it with other writing in the application to confirm that the application essays are the student’s own work.

Source: official ERB ISEE materials.

The EDUBUS assessment is that admission offices read the essay from two angles. The first is as a writing sample: whether, in limited time, the student can organize an essay around the prompt with a beginning, a development and an ending. The second is as a reference on character: the experience the student chooses and how the student explains that choice give admission officers a more concrete impression of the student. There is no published common standard for how much weight each school gives the essay, and this page does not speculate. For Irvine families, the most direct implication is that the application essays and the ISEE essay should be broadly consistent in quality and style. If the application essays have gone through several rounds of revision while the test essay is clearly weaker, the gap itself will draw attention.

Prompt types

This section helps students quickly identify what a prompt requires after reading it. The official materials state that the essay prompt asks students to respond to an assigned topic so that schools can learn more about the student and about the student’s ability to organize and express ideas. In teaching, the EDUBUS teaching team groups common prompts into three types. The sample prompts in the table below were written by EDUBUS and are not official prompts.

Type	Original sample prompt	What the prompt asks for	Writing focus
Personal experience	Describe a time when you had to learn something difficult.	A specific event and what the student learned from it	What the event helped the student understand
Opinion	Should students be allowed to choose all of their own classes? Explain your view.	A clear position with two or three reasons and examples	Whether the reasons hold up
Hypothetical	If you could spend one day in any job, which job would you choose and why?	A choice and the qualities of the student it reflects	What interests or values the choice reveals

The three types differ in form but share the same requirements: each must answer the prompt itself, each needs concrete examples, and each must let the reader see the student’s thinking. The difference lies in the writing focus, shown in the last column of the table.

Structure and time allocation

This section presents not a fixed template but an order of decisions: first confirm what the prompt requires, then decide what to write and how to arrange the paragraphs. ERB’s preparation articles recommend that the essay follow the structure students know from school, an introduction, two or three body paragraphs and a conclusion, with concrete examples to support the ideas. On that basis, EDUBUS recommends that students allocate their time as shown below. The time allocation is an EDUBUS teaching recommendation, not an official rule.

Stage	Suggested time	Decisions to make
Reading the prompt	2–3 minutes	Circle the verbs in the prompt (describe, explain, agree) and confirm whether it asks for an experience, a position or a choice
Choosing material and outlining	3–4 minutes	Choose a familiar example; write down a one-sentence central idea and the one point each paragraph will make
Writing	18–20 minutes	Respond to the prompt directly in the introduction; give each body paragraph a single focus, first the event, then the idea
Checking	3–5 minutes	Read the whole essay, confirm that it responds to the prompt, and correct obvious spelling, tense and subject-verb agreement errors

Source: official ERB ISEE materials.

The key to confirming what the prompt requires is writing the one-sentence central idea. Take the prompt about a time the student had to learn something difficult. Writing “I learned to swim” only reports an event; writing “I discovered that what frightens us is often not the task itself but not having started yet” states an idea. Once this sentence is settled and every later paragraph develops it, the essay is unlikely to drift from the prompt.

When choosing material, EDUBUS recommends small and specific events. A piano practice session, a ball game or helping a neighbor move is easier to write about in detail than “I took part in many activities.”

Common problems and how to fix them

This section lists the three problems EDUBUS sees most often when grading students’ timed essays, together with the corresponding fixes.

Problem	Typical symptom	Fix
Drifting from the prompt	The student sees a familiar topic and starts writing prepared content. For example, the prompt asks about a time the student changed an opinion, and the student writes about a most memorable trip; however vivid the trip, the essay does not answer the prompt	Write the central sentence while reading the prompt; look back at the prompt after finishing each paragraph
Narration without ideas	The account is complete, but the whole essay stays at “first… then… finally…”. Admission offices want the essay to show how the student thinks, and an essay that only narrates cannot provide this	Reserve the last one or two sentences of each body paragraph to explain what the event shows
Grammar and spelling errors	Inconsistent tenses, sentences missing a subject or a verb, and long sentences that lose their structure. The official materials state that schools look at the student’s command of grammar and spelling, so these errors will not be overlooked	First express ideas accurately in short, complete sentences, then gradually practice compound sentences

The EDUBUS assessment is that errors that interfere with understanding need attention before occasional slips. Students whose first language is not English do not need to use sentence patterns they are unsure of in order to sound sophisticated.

Example: original prompt, sample paragraph and commentary

This section uses an original EDUBUS prompt and an original sample paragraph to demonstrate the approach of pairing an event with an idea. The sample paragraph is about 150 words, equivalent to one body paragraph of a test essay, and is written at a level a Middle Level student can reach.

Sample prompt (personal experience, original to EDUBUS)

Describe a time when you changed your mind about something. What made you change it, and what did you learn?

Sample paragraph (original to EDUBUS)

In fifth grade, I believed that practicing piano meant playing a piece from beginning to end as many times as I could. Every evening I started at the first measure, stumbled through the difficult middle section, and finished feeling tired but proud. Then, two weeks before my spring recital, my teacher asked me to play only the eight measures I kept missing, slowly, ten times in a row. At first this seemed like a waste of time, because it did not feel like real music. However, within a few days the passage that had worried me for a month became the part I played most confidently. That experience changed how I think about practice. Working hard is not the same as working on the right thing. Now, when I study for a math test, I no longer redo every problem in the chapter; I find the types of questions I miss and spend my time there.

Commentary: strengths

• It stays close to the prompt. The prompt asks what opinion changed; the first sentence states the original belief, and the paragraph then shows clearly how that belief changed.
• The details are specific. Details such as playing only the measures the student kept missing, slowly and repeatedly, make the reader believe the event really happened.
• It rises from event to idea. “Working hard is not the same as working on the right thing” is the central sentence of the paragraph; it turns a piano practice experience into an insight that can be carried over to other situations.
• It carries the idea over. The last sentence applies the insight to math review, showing that it really changed what the student does and answering the “what did you learn” part of the prompt.

Commentary: areas for improvement

• The central sentence could appear earlier. Reading time on test day is limited; previewing the idea that working hard is not the same as working on the right thing in the first half of the paragraph would help the reader grasp the main point sooner.
• One more sentence could explain the reason for the change. The paragraph describes the teacher’s request and the result, but not why the student was willing to follow it at the time. Adding a sentence about an inner hesitation or the reasoning that persuaded the student would make the change of mind more convincing.
• The example of carrying the idea over could be more specific. If the phrase about finding the types of questions the student misses named a specific type, such as fraction word problems, the ending would be more persuasive.
• Watch for repeated words. “Time” appears several times in the paragraph; one instance could be replaced during checking.

Practice methods

This section gives practice steps that can be carried out in the months before the test.

1. Complete one timed 30-minute essay every one or two weeks, placed after other practice in test order to simulate the fatigue of writing at the end of the test.
2. Choose the response format that matches the test format. Students taking the online test must type their essays, so practice should also be timed on a keyboard to become familiar with typing speed in advance.
3. After writing, the student first checks the essay against the three problems described in “Common problems and how to fix them” above, and then the teacher grades it.
4. Build a stock of material. The student prepares several genuine personal experiences, such as a failure, a change of mind or a time of helping others, and writes a one-sentence central idea for each.
5. On test day, when a prompt differs from those practiced, the student chooses the most fitting experience from the prepared material and reorganizes it to meet the prompt.

For Irvine families, ISEE essay preparation usually takes place in the same fall as the independent school application essays. Practicing both kinds of writing in the same period helps the student develop a consistent voice and prevents too large a gap between the test essay and the application essays.

EDUBUS courses

EDUBUS private ISEE tutoring includes essay training and can schedule timed writing practice for the level the student is taking. Course formats and prices are listed on ISEE courses and assessment.