Students brace for new SAT

The College Board won't roll out the new SAT until March, but students, schools and the tutoring industry are getting ready.

The Class of 2006 — now finishing its sophomore year — will be the first to be scored on the new 2400-point scale instead of the traditional 1600 points. The test-takers also will have to write an essay, know more grammar and do higher-level math.

The new test will last three hours and 45 minutes — 45 minutes longer than the current exam.

The new test will have one five-minute bathroom break. A couple of brief breaks also will be offered so kids can stretch. Test prep and tutoring companies are already developing sample tests and study materials.

Princeton Review and Kaplan plan to begin offering prep courses this summer — at $799 to $945 for classroom instruction, $99 to $699 for online instruction and more than $3,600 for private tutoring.

Already, there's plenty of confusion among high school students about how to prepare, which test to take and when to take it.

Kaplan advises students to take the old SAT this fall or winter and the new one in the spring because some colleges will take the best of either.

"The current exam is frankly going to be easier for most students," said Jon Zeitlin, general manager of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan.

Princeton Review recommends skipping the old one and concentrating on the new one in the spring. Joel Rubin, vice president of the Princeton Review, believes the new test will be easier because it doesn't include those dreaded analogies or quantitative comparisons.

The new SAT won't be harder, just different, according to Brian O'Reilly, executive director, SAT information and services for the College Board.

He said that 70 percent of the new writing test score is based on multiple-choice questions of the type that have been used on the PSAT or Preliminary SAT since 1997.

Only students who "are extremely poor writers" may prefer the old test, he said, adding the essay isn't intended to find the next Ernest Hemingway but instead is meant to determine whether students are competent enough to write in college.

Rubin said the essay scares students the most, but that can be tackled by learning the specific style and format graders want. "The essay is a very formulaic exercise," Rubin said.

O'Reilly doesn't think students should be discouraged by the test's length.

"There's a lot of research that says kids will get tired, but their performance does not actually lag until about five or six hours, as long as they know why they're doing it. For a college admissions test, there's a real strong motivation to work at it," O'Reilly said.

With the changes ahead, the anxiety is showing.

Kaplan reported that requests to take its free sample tests and introductory workshops increased 78 percent this year over last.

More than $523 million will be spent this year on preparation for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams, according to Edutest, a for-profit education-focused market research and consulting firm in Boston.