The additions add three-quarters of an hour, bringing the SAT to a hand-cramping three hours and 45 minutes.
On March 12, an estimated 330,000 students will become the first group to confront it.
The nonprofit College Board, which administers the test, hopes the changes will lead to improved writing education in elementary and high school classrooms. College admissions officers, wary of well-polished application essays, are counting on the test's raw copy (which schools can opt to receive) to give them a truer sense of students' ability to make a coherent argument on paper.
Students are mostly just hoping to survive the thing.
"A lot of people think if you fail it, you're going to fail in life," said 16-year-old Lower Merion junior Anna Xu, who has been preparing for the SAT since her freshman year.
That sense of dread is nothing new, but educators and test-prep teachers said the worries now seem more pronounced.
What's a "good" score on the new, 2,400-point scale? How will the essay be graded? And just who are the nameless readers judging the writing samples?
It's not just students and their parents who are uncertain. While some colleges are requiring the new SAT, many are willing to accept the old one, which was administered for the last time on Jan. 22. Some admissions officers - including those at Pennsylvania State University - plan to ignore scores from the writing part of the test when deciding which students to accept. At least for the moment.
Colleges use the SAT to help predict how successful an applicant will be as a college freshman. "But right now, we don't know how good a forecaster of future academic performance this writing component is," said John J. Romano, vice provost and dean for enrollment management at Penn State.
Other schools, such as the University of Pennsylvania, remain uncertain how to handle the new writing section.
