The importance of the STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—subjects has been highly touted in much of today’s culture. Clearly, these subjects are linked by the common thread of mathematical concepts used throughout them. It is never too early to be concerned about developing the skills needed for these potential collegiate courses of study, so it is pivotal for the young student to cultivate and develop all of the necessary mathematical skills early in his or her career. The ISEE Middle Level examination acknowledges this fact in the comprehensive battery of topics that it tests in its mathematics achievement section. This examination portion tests the young student’s acquired mathematical abilities in a direct manner, focusing on the conceptual equipment that the student has gained. This provides the potential admissions boards at your chosen school with the data needed for assessing the mastery of content of material that he or she has studied thus far in his or her schooling.

The more rigorous the mathematics program at a given private school, the more likely it will be that the admissions panels will have higher expectations for the mathematical skills of the young student. The middle school years represent a pivotal time in mathematical formation, during which many important foundations are built for future topics to be covered in high school mathematics and science. The ISEE Middle Level mathematics section tests the skills needed for building such foundations. In part, these skills are represented by general conceptual achievements. Such things include the properties of numbers and arithmetical operations—the ways that negative and positive numbers interact, the ability to interpret fractional numbers and their interactions in various operations, and so forth. Likewise, it will be expected that the young student has mastered the basic geometric and algebraic skills needed for performing calculations on variables and calculating the properties of figures of various shapes. All such questions are very focused on the conceptual achievements of the students and represent an important aspect of this section’s inquiries.

The Middle Level exam also tests certain abstract reasoning concepts that the student has learned heretofore. (The testing of general abstract reasoning skills will be tested on the quantitative reasoning section of the exam). Such skills will apply to more advanced uses of functions, the ability to see patterns in numbers and variables, and skills at interpreting and applying data provided in various charts and graphs. In later studies—both mathematical and scientific—such abstract skills will be important, as mathematical concepts come to be applied to higher-order topics. These questions on the Middle Level exam’s mathematical reasoning section help to verify that the student has acquired the skills in algebra and data-interpretation needed for such increasingly advanced uses of mathematics.

The import of early mathematical formation cannot be under-stressed; therefore, this section of the ISEE is just as important as the others. It provides a critical measure of your young student’s acquisition of skills, assuring admissions panels that he or she is prepared for the increasing rigors of late-middle-school mathematics in preparation for the various courses that will be taken in the course of high school studies.