Practice essay can be an online awakening

At least two of my pronouns were ambiguous, my paragraphs were too short and I used too many fancy words. While my persuasiveness was "very high," my relevance was (ouch!) low.

A bad session with my editor?

No — those were the quibbles returned to me after I took a practice SAT essay test, then submitted it for online evaluation via the test-prep CD that comes with Adam Robinson's book: "The RocketReview Revolution: The Ultimate Guide to the New SAT" (New American Library, $29.95).

There's no way to guarantee that one book or interactive CD will spell success for a student, but Robinson's chapters are current, cogent and useful.

Students can try his RocketScore and OmniProctor tests free on the Web site, www.rocketreview.com. The sample test-taking (OmniProctor comes complete with simulated test-center background noise) provides a user-friendly means for productive practice and at the very least will reduce a student's pretest anxiety.

The question I chose was this:

Write an essay that discusses this statement. You may use illustrations from history, literature, current events, or your own experience or personal observation: "No progress is possible without sacrifice."

When comments on my essay flashed back, I was given a pep talk and a few specific suggestions: longer paragraphs, a few less smarty-pants words, and so on. Robinson describes the evaluation as mimicking what a human test scorer would likely do.

A confession: I wrote my essay on the computer, then copied it into the evaluation form. However, the CD instructs students to write the essay out by hand, as in the real SAT tests. It must then be typed into a form on the CD and sent off for swift computer-generated evaluation.

Many kids have bemoaned the difficulty of writing a timed essay in cursive, something they rarely do in this age of keyboarding and printing. So, yes, practicing writing essays by hand is very wise.

Robinson, a former member of The Princeton Review staff, is a brash, often-quoted testing guru whose latest book cajoles, warns, schmoozes and teach strategies for doing well on SATs. (He knows something about high-end college admissions; he's received degrees from the Wharton business school and Oxford University, according to his Web site.)

The good news is, despite my shortcomings, I still scored the equivalent of an 800, the top score, on the CD practice test. This was pathetically gratifying, given that when I took the College Boards for real, some 31 years ago, I was so far below a top score that I couldn't have seen it with a telescope.