A Study in Stress: Students Cram for Overhauled SAT : Education: The dreaded college entrance exam will be unveiled in spring. Prep courses do a thriving business.

The “real thing” may be months away, but 15-year-old Anjuli Kumar is taking no chances when it comes to the dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test.

For practice, she has taken the PSAT--a condensed version of the exam for high school juniors--every year since the seventh grade. Her bookshelves at home are chockablock with SAT manuals purchased by her parents.

But now the test’s creators have thrown Anjuli and thousands of students like her for a loop. Three years after announcing the biggest overhaul of the SAT in nearly half a century, the national College Board is set to unveil the retooled college admissions exam next spring, striking fear into the hearts of teen-agers across the country.

“I’m totally freaked out,” said Anjuli, who is spending her summer in a private tutoring course to gear up for the revised test. “I’m more familiar with the old one.”

The new exam reflects a shift toward critical reading and away from the multiple-choice format that has dominated the SAT since its debut in 1926. The changes have deepened the paranoia of students, many of whom regard the SAT as the gatekeeper to a prestigious university and a successful life.

More than 2 million students take the test each year, and about 2,000 institutions strongly recommend or require it of their applicants. College guides often trumpet SAT scores as a measure of a university’s selectivity, with the average score of Ivy League students hovering around 1,300 points out of a possible 1,600.

To cope with the test revisions, thousands of anxious high school students are piling into expensive crash courses, some of which promise three-digit score increases and charge $650 to $700 for classes that last six to eight weeks.

“People are crazed about the new test,” said John Katzman, president of the Princeton Review, one of the nation’s largest providers of SAT prep courses. “The kids, and even more the parents, are pretty nervous about this thing.”

The initial printing of a Princeton Review flyer outlining the new exam was pushed from 50,000 to more than half a million, Katzman said. Enrollment by sophomores in its summer sessions has doubled nationwide--an increase also reported by his company’s chief rival, Kaplan Educational Centers, which have offered test preparation courses for 54 years.

“When you want to go to a top-notch college, you have to think of the SAT score,” said Anjuli, a Beverly Hills High School student, who attends classes in Kaplan’s Brentwood office and hopes to attend Harvard University.

In October, the PSAT will reflect the revisions made to the coming SAT, lending even more urgency to preparing over the summer because performance on the preparatory test determines eligibility for the coveted National Merit scholarships.

“I wouldn’t want my score to drop just because (the test is) new,” another worried Brentwood Kaplan enrollee said one afternoon as dozens of like-minded students in surrounding rooms worked on practice tests, listened to test preparation tapes and chewed the erasers on their No. 2 pencils.

Other teen-agers--many of whom make daily pilgrimages to the prep centers to study--scanned bulletin boards for the telephone numbers of tutors or schedules of courses.

Ironically, despite the swelling demand for their services, the coaching services say the SAT’s changes are largely cosmetic. Not surprisingly, they contend that their techniques are more germane than ever, although the New York-based College Board steadfastly maintains that the impact of coaching is negligible.

On the verbal portion of the new SAT--renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test to distance it from the stigma of intelligence tests--reading comprehension will account for more than half of the questions, up from 30% on the current test. Excerpts will be longer and supposedly less boring. So-called double passages will require students to compare two perspectives of the same topic.

In sessions at the commercial test preparation centers, students learn how to pick up cues from the complexity of responses, their length and their slant. For example, test-takers are often taught to steer clear of answers that adopt absolute positions or seem too ambiguous.

“We call it Goldilocks,” said Gregory Rorke, president of the Kaplan Educational Centers. “When she went to the porridge, she said: ‘This one’s too hot, this one’s too cold.’ We say: ‘This (answer’s) too hard, this one’s too soft,’ or ‘This one’s too broad, this one’s too specific,’ and ‘This one’s just right.’ ”

Coaching services also agree that no response that could be deemed offensive to any group will be the correct one, especially after continuing accusations that the SAT is inherently biased against women and minorities.

“The test is PC (politically correct),” said Katzman, whose company has been in business for a dozen years. “The key to reading questions isn’t the reading--it’s the questions.”

A recent study by a University of Georgia professor showed that students were able to answer sample SAT reading questions correctly 43% of the time without reading the passages upon which they were based. The success rate was more than double the 20% that guessing would yield, leading the study’s author, Stuart Katz, to conclude: “There are testing skills that are independent of the reading,” such as deducing correct answers from the way they are couched.

Officials with the Educational Testing Service, which writes the SAT under the guidance of the College Board, describe such results as not terribly worrisome. The students’ ability to answer without having seen the passages demonstrates the very kind of sophisticated reading skills the SAT is trying to measure, they say.

But crash course organizers cite such results as evidence that test-taking skills and tricks can be of value--the difference, perhaps, between a mediocre and respectable performance.

Although score increases vary widely, Katzman said the average jump for students who have taken a Princeton Review course is 110 to 160 points. Kaplan representatives cite a similar figure.

And some contend that students’ chances of improving their scores through coaching will be even better with the elimination of the detested antonyms section of the verbal test, a source of headaches for students who toil to commit long lists of arcane word definitions to memory. On the new test, sentence completion will test knowledge of vocabulary in context. Students can learn to hunt for clues in surrounding words and to avoid “distractors”--attractive but misleading answers.

“The toughest section by far to prepare for was the antonyms. Learning words from a dictionary or a 3,000-word list was about the least efficient way of coaching kids for the SAT,” Katzman said. “But it’s possible to become better at deciphering a word from context.”

On the math portion of the new test, students will be allowed to use calculators for the first time, although College Board officials emphasize that all questions can be answered without them. Indeed, coaching services are making a point to train students how to determine when to use a calculator, telling the youths that the devices can slow them down on a test where speed is of the essence.

In one of the new exam’s most radical departures from the original, 10 of the 60 math queries will be “grid-in” questions, which require test-takers to come up with their own responses instead of choosing from several choices. Students must record their answers by filling in bubbles that represent numbers and decimal points.

The shift is generally hailed as an important step away from the limitations of multiple-choice exams, but critics call the grid-in process confusing. College Board officials, who have been trying to publicize the changes, acknowledge that students who are more familiar with the new format will be better equipped to take the SAT.

That is an unfair advantage for teen-agers whose parents can afford the pricey private prep courses, critics argue. At high schools in the inner city, students must rely on bulletins, study guides or counselors to inform them of the changes and to correct popular misconceptions, such as the mistaken belief that an essay will be included on the revamped exam.

But because fewer youths from the inner city attend four-year colleges, school officials say, fear over the SAT and the revisions do not appear as great among them as their suburban counterparts in the San Fernando Valley or the Westside.

In Encino recently, nearly 50 high school students crowded into the local Kaplan office to take a sample new PSAT--a “free test drive” designed to familiarize them with the changes.

“Every time my son reaches the year (for a standardized test), they change the test,” said Zartik Megerdoomian, who waited as her son took the sample exam. “I intend to send my son directly to a university, so we should be on top of everything.”

“I heard that this one was going to be harder,” said Mojdeh Naziri, 16, of Woodland Hills, echoing the apprehension of many of her peers who believe that the SAT seals their college fates.

A national survey conducted last year showed that high school students consider standardized test scores to be the most important element on their college applications. University officials say the SAT score constitutes just one of many factors--”you don’t live and die by it,” said Heather Woodcock, associate director of admissions at Brown University--but many students find that to be scant assurance.

Some, like 16-year-old Yoeli Barag, are contemplating taking the old SAT this fall in addition to the new spring version just to be sure they will not be caught at a disadvantage.

“I want to beat the change,” said Yoeli, who attends Taft High School in Woodland Hills. “I want to pass this.”