I bought this for my son's high school (9th grade entry) prep, and we literally devoured this book. He felt very prepared as a result and did as well as he could (more on this below). But I'd say it's not necessarily for everyone esp. if the assumption is "this book will prepare the kid to score 100%" (and I don't think any single book would). In summary:
Pros:
- Plenty of practice questions by categories in a a very diverse fashion. One could choose to focus on particular section (e.g., synonyms for vocab, statistics for math) to work on areas that need development.
- Good organization overall - the diagnostic test upfront helps assess the areas the one needs to work on and then choose to work specific sections (as above). One can also take the whole practice test toward the tail end of the book to simulate the time pressure and a mixed set of questions that you'd see in a real test---we tried taking the same practice test a few times and the repetition was still helpful in solidifying learning.
Cons:
- Answer keys don't come with explanations (except for scant examples at the beginning of each section). This wasn't a problem for us, as I was highly engaged in checking answers and was able to explain why the answers were what they were.
- But this means that, if you expect your child/student to be completely independent and to self-learn from the book, some of the questions (esp. in math, like trigonometry, imaginary numbers, etc) may not be digestible as an 8th grader who's only finishing up halfway through her curriculum, as test is taken by January, around when most high school application deadlines seem to fall.
Also, vocab practices are great thanks to their volume in this book, but it should be pretty obvious to everyone that to score on vocab well, one needs to read a lot and have a habit of looking up the words (in context) than simply looking up the meaning of the words through practice tests, although *any* practice is still helpful. This is one area that my son couldn't score more than 50-60% simply from this book. (He reads voraciously, but doesn't have a habit of look up words.)
And one more note on another review that pointed that the book doesn't compute the actual scaled score from the percentages of correct answers---that is true, but I'm afraid the scaled scores may not be all that relevant, as emphasis on ISEE performance seems to lie more on Stanines (9-level relative distribution, like quartile, except 9 levels instead of 4), and given fluctuation of questions, ISEE report card seems to put more emphasis on the stanines than the 760-940 scale that they do compute.
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