Does a good CAT4 score mean a good ISEB Pre-Test result?

This is one of the questions I get most often from parents preparing their children for UK independent school entrance exams.

The short answer? Not necessarily.

A strong CAT4 result is a great sign of your child knowing the syllabus well — but the ISEB Pre-Test requires a completely different exam technique!

What the CAT4 Really Measures

The CAT4 (Cognitive Abilities Test) is designed to assess a child’s potential, not their learned knowledge. It tests four core reasoning areas:

• Verbal Reasoning: Understanding and analysing language

• Quantitative Reasoning: Recognising number patterns

• Non-Verbal Reasoning: Spotting visual patterns and logic

• Spatial Reasoning: Visualising shapes and movement

  
  

It’s used widely in UK and international schools to measure underlying cognitive ability.

But crucially — the CAT4 is non-adaptive. That means every question is worth the same amount. Students are rewarded for speed and breadth, not necessarily accuracy or depth.

The best strategy in CAT4? Move quickly, answer everything you can, skip hard ones and come back if time allows.

What the ISEB Pre-Test Measures

The ISEB Common Pre-Test is a very different experience.

It’s adaptive — meaning that when your child answers a question correctly, the next one becomes harder. Each student’s test adjusts in real time based on their performance.

The curriculum is largely the same as the CAT4 test, but because each question gets harder it means there are many more multi-step, difficult worded questions and several answers that are very similar. It requires a lot more thought and care when answering and it is much easier to select a wrong answer by mistake.

So unlike the CAT4, exam technique plays a huge part. In the ISEB, rushing is punished. Each mistake can drop your child down a level, making it essential to be accurate and careful all the time.

What Parents Can Do to Help

Here are three practical ways a parent or tutor can help:

1. Make sure your child knows the curriculum really well and does lots of practice with worded problems (it may not be obvious at first that it is a dividing fractions question for example!)

2. Practise questions under time pressure

3. Practise adaptive mock tests together, building up confidence over time.

Final Thoughts

The CAT4 and ISEB Pre-Test are both valuable assessments, but they serve very different purposes.

A strong CAT4 score shows potential. A strong ISEB result shows performance under exam conditions.

With the right preparation — balancing both accuracy and confidence — your child can perform at their true ability level when it matters most.

📎 Want to understand exactly how the ISEB Pre-Test works? Download my free Parent’s Briefing on the ISEB Pre-Test: mrsebastian.co.uk/start