The Hardest ISEE Verbal Problem

STUMPERS Volume 1: To choose or not to choose.

In this series of posts, we will explore some of our practice questions that have stumped a remarkable number of students. We hope to highlight some common mistakes and how to avoid them on the official test.

For our first installment, we’ll look at the ISEE question with the very lowest correct rate out of more than 4,000 practice questions on our tests.

So here’s the question, from one of our Middle Level practice exams. See if you can fill in the blank with the correct word:

In contrast to San Diego’s downtown cityscape, the upscale —— of Rancho Santa Fe enchants with sprawling estates, lush foliage, and mature equestrian trails.

A) asylum

B) hamlet

C) monarch

D) metropolis

Think you know it? Okay, now check your answer. If you answered B) hamlet, then you are smarter than quite a few fifth graders. Believe it or not, only 7 percent of our test takers answered this question correctly. That’s far below the 25 percent correct rate that we’d expect from a random guess. Now let’s delve into this question and explore what makes it such a stumper.

Why this question is so hard

Before we go into exactly why so many kids were stumped, let’s look at how they were stumped. It turns out that a whopping 62 percent of kids selected D) metropolis as their answer, while 15 percent selected A) asylum and 16 percent selected C) monarch. So each wrong answer received many more bites than the correct one.

Metropolis must be such a tantalizing option, but why is this? One possibility is that kids weren’t parsing the entire sentence. Perhaps they were focusing mostly on the first six words in the sentence rather than picking up on the more relevant last eight words—words that really don’t describe a metropolis. The key to this question is recognizing that “sprawling estates, lush foliage, and mature equestrian trails” are not typical features of a “downtown cityscape”.

Compounding this is the fact that it’s easier for many kids to recognize a synonym than an antonym. Once you’ve glommed onto the “San Diego cityscape” part of the question, it would be a natural step to look for another word describing this same environment (i.e., metropolis).

As for the low rate of hamlet as a guess, we could chalk this up simply to the difficulty of the word. This is a test taken by students applying to seventh and eighth grade. Some well-read kids might actually be more acquainted with the Shakespearean connotation of the word rather than the “village” or “rural community” definition.

Take-aways: How not to make this mistake

The key to correctly answering this question is threefold: carefully reading the entire sentence before selecting an answer, eliminating answers that won’t work, and thinking about how well your favorite answer fits into the sentence as a whole. As seemed to be the case with this question, carefully reading every word of the sentence is critical. The sentence completion questions on the ISEE are designed to test your mastery of context clues. You need to be the Sherlock Holmes of the ISEE and find all of these clues before coming to your ultimate conclusion.

The process of elimination is your best friend with this type of question. When you see a word like “contrasts,” “although,” or “but,” you should usually begin looking for words that would describe the opposite of other thoughts in the sentence. There should be an imaginary red flag when you see a word that actually describes the part of the sentence covered by those contrary words—this word may be there to trick you.

Once you’ve eliminated words that won’t work (like metropolis in this example), you need to read through the sentence with your word included. Does it make sense? Are there any contradictions? If not, you’ve probably nailed it.

In the case of this problem, many middle schoolers may be less sure of the word asylum. However, many may know the word monarch from studying history in school. Even if a student can only eliminate two answer choices, they will have significantly raised their likelihood of selecting the correct answer. In this problem, if a student pays attention and knows the word metropolis, they will have saved themselves from the most tempting of wrong answers.

(Original post published May 13th, 2015. Updated on October 25th, 2017.)