Interversity.Org

Monday, February 21, 2005 Posted: 10:39 AM EST (1539 GMT) at CNN

(AP) -- It's no mystery what sent a record flood of students to SAT test-prep courses this year: anxiety over the new, written portion of the college entrance exam.

But while the essay has generated most of the buzz surrounding the debut of the new SAT on March 12, it's only one of several changes.

"I've heard from some teachers that some of their students are asking, 'Why are we not spending half the class on the essay?"' said Andy Lutz, vice president for program development at test-prep company Princeton Review.

The answer, Lutz said, is easy: The essay counts for only about one-third of the score of one of three sections.

Or, as well-prepared students could tell you, about one-ninth of the overall test. Students will tackle the essay first, for 25 minutes. But after that, they'll still have three hours, 20 minutes to go -- and their scores could depend more on how they handle the other changes made by test-owner the College Board.

In many ways, the rest of the exam will look familiar to students who have taken the PSAT or old SAT. But the mix of questions will be different, and there will be some new formats. The basic changes: new kinds of grammar questions, more advanced math, more reading comprehension and less vocabulary. The little-loved analogies ("fire is to conflagration as snow is to ...") are gone, as are quantitative comparisons, which asked students to identify the larger of two values.

"I think most people are actually happier about these changes because a lot of people like myself didn't like analogies," said Nora Hakkakzadeh, a high school junior from Woodland Hills, California, who is preparing for the March 12 sitting. Still, she said she did well on quantitative comparisons, so she's less happy about the math changes.

The College Board says the new version will be "different, not harder." And even if it feels harder to some, the results are scored on a curve. As long as everyone finds the test harder, then fewer correct answers would be required to get the same score as before.

more here