For one brief moment, after years of fear and loathing, America seemed ready to make peace with the SAT. When the University of California several years ago threatened to treat the test like a bad batch of cafeteria food and tell applicants not to buy it, the College Board junked the bewildering analogy questions (Warthogs are to pigs as politicians are to what?), created a writing section (including producing an essay), added tougher math questions and more reading analysis --and had everybody talking about the new-and improved SAT. Then the first students to take SAT: The Sequel were seen stumbling out of the testing centers as if they had just run a marathon, and all the happy talks ended. With the three hours and 45 minutes stretching to five hours with breaks and instructions, it got worse. Nobody is sure how, but moisture in some SAT answer sheets caused pencil marks to bleed or fade, producing more than 5,000 tests with the wrong scores. Even after that was fixed, several universities reported a sharp drop in their applicants' average scores, which many attributed to exhaustion, and more colleges told applicants they would no longer have to take the SAT. All of which stoked interest in the ACT, the SAT's less famous and less feared rival based in Iowa City, Iowa. The shorter test is now becoming a welcome alternative for many high schoolers who no longer see a need to endure the usual SAT trauma. 'I think the ACT is a true player in the college-admissions game these days,' says Robyn Lady, until recently a college counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Although most Jefferson students still take the SAT, the number of ACTs there has tripled in the last two years. It's a shift that, if it continues, could change the balance of entrance test power, since the Fairfax County, Va. , magnet sends more kids to the fry League than almost any other U.S. school. The SAT, with a maximum 2,400 points, and the ACT, with a maximum 36 points, are scored differently, but otherwise are no more different from each other than American football differs from the Canadian version. Students usually do equally well on each. The SAT's new 25 minute essay is required, while the ACT's essay is optional. The SAT is three hours and 45 minutes long. The comparable ACT is three hours and 25 minutes. The SAT has three sections: critical reading, math and writing. The ACT has math, science, reading and English sections, plus optional writing. The ACT with the writing test costs $ 43, more than the SAT's $ 41.50, but the ACT is only $ 29 without the writing section. Several high school guidance counselors say they assume the ACT, with 1.2 million test takers in the class of 2005 compared with 1.5 million for the SAT, will eventually catch up, in part because so many educators are advising their students to try both. Wendy Andreen, counselor at Memorial Senior High School in Houston--where the SAT has been supreme--says she tells students every year they should take both tests to be safe, and many are beginning to listen, with ACTs up 18 percent since 2002. Deb Shaver, director of admissions at Smith College, says counselors are steering students to the ACT 'because there is less hysteria surrounding the ACTs, and students feel less stressed about taking the test.' The mistakes made in the scoring of the October 2005 SAT by Pearson Educational Measurement, the College Board's subcontractor, have no been forgotten, counselors say. The SAT suffered from damaging news stories as details of the errors came out bit by bit. In the end, 4,411 students had scores reported to colleges that were lower than they actually earned and had to be corrected 17 percent of the corrections were for more than 40 points. College Board president Caston Caperton apologized, saying the mishap 'brings humility, and humility makes us more aware, empathetic and respectful of others.' But ma