Another challenge is being added to many students’ years in high school: the daunting prospect of putting pen or pencil to paper.

In an age dominated by computers and text-messaging, some students are expressing worry about the new, 2,400-point Scholastic Aptitude Test. Changes in the test include the addition of an 800-point writing section that requires, as well as multiple-choice answers to questions covering grammar and usage, a 25-minute handwritten essay.

The SAT, a source of anxiety for American students since 1947, is being changed after complaints from the University of California system, one of the College Board’s biggest customers. California’s assertion that it would forgo the test as an admissions requirement made the College Board sit up and take notice. The new SAT, which caters to current curriculum in high school and college, reinforces the importance of writing in a student’s education and contributes a third set of skills for colleges to weigh in the admissions process.

Other changes include eliminating analogies from the Critical Reading section, currently called Verbal, and adding short reading passages to the existing longer passages. Nor will the Math section be unchanged: It now will draw upon third-year college-preparatory math but will discard the quantitative comparisons, according to the College Board.

The first administration of the new SAT is scheduled for next March. In response, popular test-prep companies such as Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions report a record 78% increase in enrollment in its free SAT practice test sessions and workshops. Penmanship is virtually obsolete in schools, where some students write even their class notes on computers – where electronic cues alert them to errors in spelling or grammar. Some students fear that they may write a good essay during the test, only to be penalized for bad handwriting.

“It’s not so much a question of poor penmanship,” Kaplan’s director of SAT and ACT programs, Jennifer Karan, said, “as it is of making sure kids are comfortable with handwriting at all, at a time when kids are encouraged to type all their homework assignments.”

Student-written essays will be scanned onto a computer to be graded from 1 to 6, with 6 the highest score, by a certified reader. The readers are being put through a rigorous online training course. According to the College Board, readers must hold a bachelor’s degree or higher and must have taught in the past five years.

If, after three separate evaluations by different readers, a student’s essay remains illegible, the essay is to receive a zero. Medical exemption will be granted, however, to those with learning disabilities that affect handwriting.

“I will have to write slower,” Mark Roytman, a junior at Stuyvesant High School, said. “I won’t be able to write as much as I want, and that puts me at a disadvantage.”

The head of the English Department at Stuyvesant, Eric Grossman, sympathized with that foreboding. “It isn’t easy using a skill you learned in grade school,” he said.

Kaplan, a popular test prep company that prepares students for more than 35 different exams, plans to offer 13 free practice essay events in the tri-state area, according to Ms. Karan. She expressed confidence that poor penmanship will do little to prevent students from receiving the scores they deserve.

“Obviously their essays need to be legible,” she said. “Do they need to produce perfect penmanship? No. Everyone expects a completed rough draft.”

A Queens resident, Christine Zhuang, who expects to take the lengthened 3-hour-45-minute test in March, said: “You can be really smart, but write illegibly. I’m going to lose points to stupid neat people.”