After being trapped in one-armed classroom desks for more than four hours, with just two short breaks, there was one thing a group of teens taking a practice test for the new SAT could agree on:

This college entrance exam will be long, really long.

The College Board won't roll out the new SAT until March, but students, schools and the tutoring industry are getting ready. On Saturday morning last weekend, about 50 high school students hunkered down in a Carnegie Mellon University classroom to try out Princeton Review's practice test.

The Class of 2006 -- who are now finishing their sophomore year -- will be the first to be scored on the new 2400-point scale instead of the traditional 1600 points. The test-takers also will have to write an essay, know more grammar and do higher-level math.

Winchester Thurston sophomore Emily Hoffman, who took Algebra 2 this year, said the math section of the practice test was "pretty hard."

She called the test "really long" but said, "I think I'll do OK, but not as well as I would have on the old one."

The new test will last 3 hours and 45 minutes -- 45 minutes longer than the current exam. That doesn't count the time needed to give instructions or breaks.

The new test will have one five-minute break, which will vary by the length of time it takes students to get to the bathroom and back. A couple of brief breaks also will be offered so kids can stretch.

The College Board has been developing the test for two years and hasn't released specifics, which committees finalized just a week ago. Questions have been pretested but still need to be assembled in the final form.

Official information on the test's makeup will arrive at schools in August, and the College Board's own study materials will come out in October.

But test prep and tutoring companies are developing sample tests and study materials, based on their review of the College Board's plans and existing tests.

Princeton Review and Kaplan plan to begin offering prep courses this summer -- at $799 to $945 for classroom instruction, $99 to $699 for online instruction and more than $3,600 for private tutoring.

Already, there's plenty of confusion among high school students about how to prepare, which test to take and when to take it.

Kaplan advises students to take the old SAT this fall or winter and the new one in the spring because some colleges will take the best of either.

"The current exam is frankly going to be easier for most students," said Jon Zeitlin, general manager of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan.

Princeton Review recommends skipping the old one and concentrating on the new one in the spring. Joel Rubin, vice president of the Princeton Review, believes the new test will be easier because it doesn't include those dreaded analogies or quantitative comparisons.

"Kids are going to get a lot of mixed messages," said Bob Alcorn, counselor at Fox Chapel Area High School.

He said the school's counselors are sticking with their usual advice for juniors: Take the PSAT in the fall and take the SAT -- in this case, the new SAT -- twice in the spring and once in the fall of the senior year.

Clint Page, a counselor at Norwin High School in Westmoreland County and past president of the Pennsylvania School Counselors Association, thinks many juniors next year will take the current exam and the new one.

"I think it's possibly a win-win situation or at least they can't lose. Most colleges will take your best set of scores."

The new SAT won't be harder, just different, according to Brian O'Reilly, executive director, SAT information and services for the College Board.

He said that 70 percent of the new writing test score is based on multiple-choice questions of the type that have been used on the PSAT since 1997.

Only students who "are extremely poor writers" may prefer the old test, he said, adding the essay isn't intended to find the next Ernest Hemingway but instead is meant to determine whether students are competent enough to write in college.

Rubin said the essay scares students the most, but that can be tackled by learning the specific style and format graders want. "The essay is a very formulaic exercise," Rubin said.

O'Reilly doesn't think students should be discouraged by the test's length.

"There's a lot of research that says kids will get tired, but their performance does not actually lag until about five or six hours, as long as they know why they're doing it. For a college admissions test, there's a real strong motivation to work at it," O'Reilly said.

With the changes ahead, the anxiety is showing.

Kaplan reported that requests to take its free sample tests and introductory workshops increased 78 percent this year over last. Princeton Review said that about 6,000 students took the free sample tests last weekend, about double a similar event a year ago.

More than $523 million will be spent this year on preparation for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams, according to Edutest, a for-profit education-focused market research and consulting firm based in Boston.

Matt Stein, an Edutest Senior Analyst, said the growth -- estimated at 5 percent this year -- is because of changes in the SAT and increased competition to get into college.

After last Saturday's practice event, Fox Chapel Area sophomore Alexandra Otte said the test was "kinda scary."

But she said she's glad it includes an essay because she likes to write. "It plays up my strengths rather than my weaknesses," she said.

Shadyside Academy sophomore Arjun Patel pronounced the math "pretty easy." But that comes from a sophomore taking an advanced calculus course that many high school seniors never tackle.

Hugh MacDonald, a counselor at Blackhawk High School in Beaver County, said the school's math and English teachers will receive instruction to help ensure they know what skills students need.

Mt. Lebanon High School already has conducted meetings for sophomores and their parents.

"I think there's a lot of apprehension as to what it's all going to mean and how it's going to play out," said Grant Williams, head guidance counselor at Mt. Lebanon High School.

At Plum High School, guidance counselor Michele Markiewicz said the anxiety hasn't started yet.

In the fall, when counselors present the changes in more detail, she said, "that's when we'll start to get more fear from the students. Right now, they're not focusing on that."

The SAT changes were triggered about three years ago when Richard Atkinson, then president of the University of California, which is the largest higher education system in the nation and a member of the College Board, threatened to stop using the test unless changes were made.

He was particularly critical of analogies which he said didn't resemble what students do in the classroom. (A sample analogy -- elastic:flexible::diamond:hard.)

Along with analogies, the College Board also eliminated quantitative comparisons. Those multiple-choice questions ask, for example, whether it can be determined whether an amount in Column A is greater, less than or equal than a quantity in Column B.

But Robert Schaeffer, spokesman for the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest, considers the changes to be driven by marketing concerns and largely "cosmetic." And he doesn't think the new test will solve the problems such as test bias.

FairTest has long been a vocal critic of the SAT. "We don't think there's much value in the SAT, new or old, period," Schaeffer said.