INSIDE THE NEW SAT.

The author reports on the development of the new SAT test for college applicants, and speculates on how the new test could change instruction in American schools. Three hours of misery are apparently not enough. Now the makers of the SAT want to shape what kids learn throughout four years of high school.True, students have always had to brush up on vocabulary and take practice tests before the SAT, but now the College Entrance Examination Board, which owns the test, is developing the "New SAT," an exhaustive revision largely intended to mold the U.S. secondary-school system to its liking. The dreaded SAT could actually help produce a national curriculum, a sweeping education reform enacted without the passage of a single law. In the process, the test itself will have to change to include questions more like classroom exercises and less like--well, less like SAT items. Students who attend failing schools could suffer as the SAT morphs from a test of general-reasoning abilities into a test of what kids learn in school. Board president Gaston Caperton believes the SAT should be a tool of social change as well as of social measurement--that it should serve communitarian ends even as it tries to give reliable, valid scores to individual kids and colleges. For decades, the SAT was, at its heart, an aptitude test; now it's becoming more like its competitor, the ACT, the nation's biggest achievement test. Board president Caperton surely has his own ambitions, but it's unlikely he would have sought such radical changes if Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, hadn't spoken out against the SAT. INSETS: WHAT'S IN AND WHAT'S OUT;SAT TIMELINE;AN SAT QUESTION: STEP BY STEP.