Each test has its own language. Of course, learning the basics of taking a standardized test will help you in other tests. For example, learning how to take the ISEE will help you learn how to take the SAT, or the ACT, or any of the Catholic high school exams. We know because it helped us. We now take tests very differently than before we started tutoring this stuff. Still, to get familiar with a certain test, you want to practice on material as close to that kind of test as you can get.

You might think of it as an accent. If you’ve learned English fluently in the US or England, you’ll do pretty well getting through Australia. But you still might be surprised to find that you have no idea what a chuck a wobbly, an op shop, or a chinwag is. If someone refers to a ripper beauty, can you even tell if you should take it as a good thing or bad?
 
Once we had figured out how to take the SAT, it was much easier to learn how to attack any other standardized test. In fact, if we had to take any other test blind now, our scores would be far better than if we had never studied all of this. But we would still want to have look at practice that is as close to the real test as possible. It’s a way of mastering that specific accent, and it makes a big difference in scores.