SURVIVING THE NEW SAT

Maybe they should just call it the SIT. Because that's what students will do when the new SAT debuts in March 2005: sit through a new grammar section, sit through a new write-your-own-essay section and sit through an already grueling test that just got 25 percent longer. The expanded college-entrance exam--three hours and 45 minutes in all--will test the patience of a generation hooked on videogames and instant messaging. It's even longer than "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." The new SAT will require perseverance, and it will require thinking in paragraphs. Standardized tests are a fact of life for high-school students, all the more so for the ones headed off for four years of further education. While all colleges profess to evaluate applicants based, of course, on their unique attributes, the sheer volume requires most schools to rely on standardized tests to create an even baseline: in theory, the SAT score of the city kid in Pittsburgh can be compared with that of the lad raised on a farm in Iowa. With applications skyrocketing at so many colleges, especially the most selective, test scores become even more attractive barometers.

All that puts preternatural pressure on high-school students. And in recent years it's led to boom times for test-prep companies (like Kaplan and the Princeton Review), as well as tutors and trade publishers. The new SAT will only dial up the stress factor. Attacking the test has long been in vogue. Among the criticisms: it's culturally biased and unfair to students at lower socioeconomic levels, and answering the questions correctly doesn't really correlate to college success. In response to some of the complaints, the College Board (which owns the test) and the Educational Testing Service (which writes it) agreed to make modifications. The new SAT may be more like the other big standardized test, the ACT Assessment (published and administered by ACT, formerly American College Testing). The ACT Assessment, most prevalent in the Midwest, aims more at mastery of curriculum than at reasoning. In the long run, it may be that the SAT becomes more predictive, but the SAT will be new, and nobody likes being a guinea pig.

What should students do? For starters, listen to Mom and Dad. A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast really do help, no matter what the test. But students should do a little preparatory work, too. The new test includes higher-level math, multiple-choice questions on grammar--and the 25-minute essay. The grammar questions will look like an editing test. If you don't know that the 10 items or less sign in the market should be 10 items or fewer, start studying. Some tutors recommend classes designed to teach English to foreigners.

What won't be on the test will be quantitative comparisons, a confusing format for math questions that asked students to measure results from two columns against each other. Also gone is the most notorious part of the verbal section: analogies are to the new SAT what dinosaurs are to the earth. Experts say that being familiar with any test's format, along with its range of questions, always helps.

Why change the test? Blame California. The University of California system is one of the SAT's biggest customers. In 2001 the then president, Richard Atkinson, started talking about dropping the test as an admissions requirement because he said colleges' overreliance on the SAT caused students to focus on test preparation, not knowledge. Instead he wanted a test that focused on high-school subjects. The College Board listened. During the last major revision, in 1994, test designers had thought about adding an essay, but they lacked technology that would allow graders to score thousands of essays quickly, says Chiara Coletti, the board's vice president of communications and public affairs. The new graders, mostly high-school and college English teachers, will receive essays electronically. "I think what [Atkinson] did was hurry us up, probably by a couple of years," Coletti says. She hopes the test will create a similar hurrying-up at high schools and middle schools that don't emphasize writing enough. Teaching to the test, she argues, wouldn't be a bad thing.

Will the change in format affect perceptions about the value of private tutoring? The College Board and test-prep companies have debated for a generation about the extent to which coaching helps. Coletti says the end of analogies--which aren't part of regular high-school English courses--should lessen any advantage gained from a tutor. Andy Lutz, vice president for program development at the Princeton Review, disagrees. He thinks the tricks for succeeding on multiple-choice questions (like avoiding answers that are meant to look right but aren't) will not change. "The new test," he says, "is going to be just as coachable."