And students won't be asked to solve problems in the essay. When that type of question was posed in preliminary testing, students "would get so distracted with the solution that they forgot that their real task was to provide a writing sample." Instead, questions will cover subjects that are "very close to a teenager's world." Dress codes, for example, or physical education.

The format will introduce a topic, give two opposing views and ask the student to take a position.

Statistically, researchers found this combination of subject and format has yielded the best range of responses, Brand says.

And she should know. For the past several weeks, Brand and a group of what she calls "range finders" have been poring over student responses to 42 such questions — about 30,000 essays produced during field tests last year — to figure out which questions are test-ready.

There is a key difference between the two: The ACT writing portion is optional, and the SAT essay is required. But they share a number of characteristics.

Like the ACT, the SAT will pose a question, or "prompt," and students are asked to take a position. But the SAT's questions will be based on one or two quotations. Sample subjects tend to be broader, touching on issues such as secrecy, or success and failure.

Also, as on the ACT, each question on the SAT must survive a rigorous screening process. "It sounds funny, but it's not easy to write one of these prompts," says Photo Anagnostopoulos, a College Board senior vice president. "You have to make sure you're not just playing to people who know about current events, that students who may not be interested in literature but are interested in science and math can answer the question."

Other similarities between the tests:

• Students will have a time limit: 25 minutes for the SAT, 30 minutes for the ACT.
• Tests will be scored in the same way: Each essay will be read by two scorers who will assign a number on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 the lowest score.

In what SAT officials call a "holistic" scoring method, trainees will be instructed to read the essay quickly — perhaps spending just two or three minutes — to get an overall impression, and then to take "everything" into account, including organization, sentence structure and facility with language.

Pulling together such a project is no small undertaking. Both companies have experience with smaller-scale essay questions such as those on the College Board's Advanced Placement exams or the Medical College Admission Test, which is administered and scored by ACT Inc.

But the SATs and ACTs are given more than 2 million times a year each. The previous method of readers coming together under one roof to go over papers would be unwieldy and expensive. So the companies will scan and distribute the essays electronically to scorers nationwide.

It's not just the volume of work that has increased. The stakes are higher, too.

"The accuracy of that first testing is going to be so crucial," says Bernie Phelan, a member of an SAT writing committee and an English teacher at Illinois' Homewood-Flossmoor High School.

And not everyone is convinced an essay is necessary. Though admissions directors at more than 350 colleges have told the College Board that they plan to require the writing test, many also plan to do in-house research on results before deciding whether to factor scores into admissions decisions. A few, including Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, will not require it.

The test "is a bold undertaking, but is it going to really add something of value?" Georgetown admissions dean Charles Deacon asks. "Maybe it will. We have our doubts."

Plans to include a standardized essay test were set in motion in 2001 when, in a national speech to college and university presidents, Richard Atkinson, then president of the University of California system, proposed dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement for the nine-campus system.

He said it failed to emphasize what is taught in the high school curriculum and recommended, among other things, that students be required to produce a writing sample.

Today, Atkinson lauds the changes. He said in a speech recently that the SAT essay will "send a clear message to K-12 students, their teachers and parents that learning to write ... is of critical importance."

Few educators would disagree. Still, some question whether the writing tests are the right way to measure that.

One concern is whether the essays are coachable. Test-prep companies already are promoting essay-writing courses, and some SAT programs are encouraging students to develop in advance a response that, with a little fine-tuning on testing day, could be applied to multiple questions.

Test developers insist that scorers will be able to detect such attempts. And Becky Hoffbauer, an Iowa artist who has been scoring essays for ACT and another Iowa City-based testing firm for about four years, says the "canned" essays tend to stand out.

"It's usually quite easy to spot," she says. "You cringe a little bit."

Another concern is the nature of the exercise.

The test is supposed to help admissions officials determine a student's readiness for college, but doing so under conditions set by the ACT and SAT tests is like "judging the ability to play basketball by saying how well you can shoot a jump shot," says Douglas Hesse, an Illinois State University English professor who chairs a composition group in the National Council of Teachers of English.

"There is some writing in college that occurs in timed, one-draft settings, but ... in most cases, students are asked to produce lengthier pieces over time, with the opportunity to revise."

Hesse also worries that the essay test might inadvertently promote what he calls the "the much-denigrated five-paragraph theme," a format in which students follow a lockstep formula: state a position in the first paragraph, support it with three examples and conclude in a final paragraph.

And "the chances of that getting an A or a B in a college course are almost nil."