The problem with the verbal reasoning portions is that they are not straight vocab. I found that the questions often required you to know the third, most obscure, use/definition of a word and then make a strange leap of questionable logic to get to the right answer. What worked for my son was doing many many many practice sets through the SSAT online study package that we bought. I assume the ISEE has something similar? His score went up a lot once he started doing that because he trained his brain to think about the vocab in a less straight forward way.