* Illustration: Christian Montenegro * I'm sitting in a second-floor classroom at Denver East High School, hunched over a desk, exerting a death grip on a No. 2 pencil. My brain is overheating. I have two difficult problems.

This is the first: z = x - y + 4.z = y - w - 3.z = w - x + 5. Based on the system of equations above, what is the value of z? A) 2; B) 3; C) 4; D) 6; E) 12.

And here's the second: What object can I use to persuade the pimply 17-year-old sitting next to me to stop with the frickin' whistling? The first time I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test was in 1985. I scored 1,120 out of a possible 1,600, thank you very much: 510 verbal, 610 math. When I signed up to take the test last autumn, I had visions of sweating through a Wi-Fi-enabled, digitally administered, robotically proctored exam that would peer into my deepest soul. But no. Today's SAT is the same endurance test it was back then: pencils and filled-in bubbles, bored proctors and stuffy study halls, anxiety and panic. "With the SAT, it turns out paper and pencil are a pretty good way of doing it if you want it available everywhere," says Laurence Bunin, a senior vice president at the College Board, the organization that administers and grades the test.

The biggest recent change is the writing portion, including a 25-minute essay question, added after the University of California threatened to stop using the SAT because it failed to properly evaluate writing skills. There's debate about whether the section has addressed that concern. MIT professor Les Perelman found that writing longer, with bigger words, is a more felicitous route to a quantitatively greater result. More than half of the 1,000 or so four-year colleges in the US disregard the writing component entirely.

Me, I sort of liked the essay topic: "Can people ever be truly original?" I finished in 15 minutes, then smirked at Pimple Face, who chicken-scratched until the end. Then came the math. I am a 38-year-old writer who uses Google to calculate percentages. Suddenly I was looking at algebra. Geometry. Functions. I stared at the booklet, trying mightily to recall Mr. Willis' fifth-period class. The SAT deducts a quarter point for wrong answers, so I left 10 of the 20 questions blank. Pimple Face finished early. That's when he started whistling.

The worst part is, I even studied. While the SAT itself remains drably low tech, study methods have made great leaps forward. There are online practice exams, emailed questions of the day, SparkNotes' iPod Vocabulary Builder, and an entire review course conducted in Second Life. I'd been lulled into overconfidence by some of these quick-hit, digitized study aids. They certainly didn't hurt, but they aren't the hardcore training one needs. Sadly, on test day I realized that one online practice exam and a few questions of the day are useless preparation for a nearly four-hour exam.

Still, I improved on my 1985 score by 130 points. A 480 in math? Still humiliating. But a 770 in critical reading? Not bad. I notched a 680 in the new writing category, but my score on the essay question — the College Board breaks out a separate assessment — was shockingly low. One grader gave me 4 out of 6 ("adequate mastery"), the other 3 ("displays developing facility in the use of language"). That's 7 out of 12. Overall score: 1,930 out of 2,400. Once again, I made the cut for the University of Michigan ... if they overlook the math. When I was in high school I almost certainly would have known the answer to the above problem: A. Today, all I have going for me is wisdom and clear skin. And, thank goodness, access to Google.

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