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Choose the best answer in the following analogy – an old shoe is to a brand new shoe as the old SAT is to: (a) your mom, (b) the ACT, (c) sucky finals or (d) the new SAT. As a UCLA student, I’m expecting you to have known the correct answer is choice (d). When something becomes obsolete it needs to be improved; with change, fear always follows.

The new SAT has gotten rid of analogies and instead adopted a 25-minute written essay. It has also added questions from algebra II and trigonometry. It claims to have made these changes to better reflect skills that universities are looking for when admitting new students.

It also hopes this will encourage schools to make writing a higher priority in their curriculum, just as the analogies section of the SAT made vocabulary memorization a priority of schools prepping their students for college admissions.

Look, I just made an analogy – and I didn’t even have to use a colon.

I personally don’t remember ever being asked to produce a good analogy outside the context of writing. I do, however, remember the masses of essays and papers that I have had to produce in a short period of time.

Some critics have argued that a society that can’t spot the correct analogy is one destined for decline. But in 1994, antonym questions were removed from the SATs. Their removal did not mean that somehow our generation is less apt to understand words with opposing meanings – it only means that the skill has been absorbed into a more comprehensive (dare I say holistic) concept of writing.

Too often, writing well is written off as being too academic. For example, a fan of mine attempted to enlighten me about the “real world.” According to him, one does not enjoy any significant gain from being able to formulate clear, concise and intellectual pieces of writing because, as he put it, “language don’t mean jazz.”

Writing is to the brain as exercise is to the body – the more you work on the first, the better the second functions. If you were to tell a doctor that exercise was “jazz,” I’d hope he’d attempt to correct you. And I wouldn’t blame him for snickering after you left.

Note that in the real world, the average person will not be asked to create a lab experiment and then report the findings. Yet it is still an important activity that high school lab sciences teach in order to hone scientific reasoning skills. Likewise, writing is a tool that helps to define and refine all types of arguments and opinions.

The only worry I have about the changes to the SAT is that the essay will favor students who come from privileged backgrounds. Improving students’ writing skills from those areas is not as difficult to accomplish as for students in urban or rural areas where class sizes and school resources make it difficult to give students the one-on-one attention they require.

The changes made to the SAT in 1994 also included allowing calculators on the math test – and the CollegeBoard acknowledges the fact that a graphing calculator will “provide an advantage” on the tests.

I would thus assume this change also favored students from a higher economic background, as the graphing calculator not only gives an advantage to answering questions, but also symbolizes a greater access to resources for the student.

Still, the solution should not be to abolish all calculators or to bring down those who enjoy the privilege; rather, it should attempt to pull up those struggling for the same privileges.

The logic that adding the essay to the SAT will make writing a more critical aspect of high school curriculums follows the same reasoning as fixes to Microsoft Windows: slapping a patch here and there is the easiest quick fix to a deeper structural problem. The patch does its job – in a way – but the problem is still there.

Still, the computer needs to run, and the kids need to have an incentive to work on their writing skills. As for the deeper structural problem, President Bush only has one more term in office. Hopefully we will then be able to leave No Child Left Behind behind us.

As college students, we don’t have to worry about the SATs anymore. But as citizens of the United States, we have to worry about the future of education; as human beings, we have to worry about the future of enlightenment.

The new SAT is a nudge in the right direction. We must continue to stress the importance of mental exercise – even if it does seem academic. After all, what’s so wrong with that?

Hashem likes her computer, despite OS’s structural problems. E-mail her at nhashem@media.ucla.edu.