In Manhattan, Inspirica, a tutoring and test-prep company, offered seminars this spring on dealing with the new test, attracting crowds of anxious parents of 10th graders.

The parents first learned the basics: the new test will be in three sections, with a perfect score of 2,400, the analogies and quantitative comparisons will be eliminated, and the new writing section will include a short essay and grammar questions.

Then they heard about the ripple effects of the changes.

"One of the ramifications of the new SAT that no one's talking about yet is what's going to happen to the SAT II subject tests," said Lisa Jacobson, the chief executive of Inspirica. "Now that there's going to be a writing test on the SAT I, the SAT II writing test is going to fall by the wayside. A lot of colleges require people to submit three SAT II's, and some will now drop back to two. But we've heard that some are still going to require three."

Parents had many questions: Now that the SAT will have three parts÷reading, math and writing÷instead of two, should tutoring start earlier? What might be the advantages of taking the ACT instead of the SAT? And perhaps most poignantly: "What about a normal regular kid? Does he stand a chance?"