Boston Latin Exam Info

Are you a Boston resident looking for better educational opportunities for your child? Boston Exam Schools provide a top notch education at no cost — the only trick is getting in.

There are three exam schools – Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. All three accept new students for grades 7 and 9. The O’Bryant School also accepts a few new students for grade 10. Admission is based entirely on a student’s grades and test scores from the Independent Schools Entrance Exam (ISEE).

Because admission is so competitive, as you can imagine only the students with the highest grades will be applying, so the pool of applicants is already very selective. For admission, grades must be at the highest level, and that’s expected as a given. So your child’s best opportunity to get in is to perform to the best of their ability on the ISEE test.

The Boston Latin Exam (which is the ISEE test without the essay section) will be held on Saturday, November 8, 2014 at twelve testing locations in Boston. The deadline to register is September 26, 2014.

The test consists of vocabulary strategies (synonyms and sentence completions), reading comprehension (reading passages and answering questions), and mathematical reasoning. Most students find the vocabulary to be the most difficult piece, and studying root words and prefixes is vital to gain this knowledge. Students also struggle with the amount of passages they need to read in the short amount of time they are allotted. Additionally, there is quite a bit of math that students will see on the test that they have not learned in school. For more information about the subject areas of the exam, please visit www.iseetest.org.

If students are taking the Boston Latin Exam and these schools are the only ones to which they are applying, they need to take the test only that one time. If they are applying to other private schools, they need to take the ISEE again at another test site, because the Boston Latin Exam scores will not transfer to other schools.

Your child’s best chance of admission is to learn the content that they have not covered in school, in addition to practicing and refining their test-taking strategies. Children at these young ages often find it difficult to manage their time on standardized tests, so it is crucial that they practice and review their time management for the best possible efficiency and performance on test day.

For More Information

ISEE Instructions for Private/Parochial/Charter Schools

ISEE Instructions for Boston Public Schools

2014-15 ISEE Bulletin of Information

2014-15 Procedures For Determining Admission to Exam Schools

Frequently Asked Questions

Contact Enrollment Planning & Support, 617-635-9512.

http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/exam