The College Board has announced that Pearson NCS, a for-profit education company, will grade the new essay portion of the SAT. The decision marks the first time in more than 50 years that a company other than the Educational Testing Service will grade any portion of the test.

ETS will continue to tabulate the scores for the rest of the revised SAT, which will be introduced next year.

Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, said the organization had awarded the contract to Pearson because that company offered a better product at a lower cost than ETS.

Mr. Caperton said the move, announced without fanfare on Pearson's Web site last July, reflects a change in the relationship between his organization and ETS.

"My interpretation is that we have a businesslike arrangement in that we are very demanding of the quality of work we expect" from ETS, Mr. Caperton said. "At one time, our work automatically went to them, but we have a higher expectation now, and that can create an edgier relationship, but its a good one."

When the College Board announced in 2002 the addition of multiple-choice reading-comprehension questions and one 20-minute essay, some education professionals criticized the move, which could increase the cost of the $25 test by as much as $10 (The Chronicle, May 31, 2002).

Mr. Caperton said it was too early to tell how much of the increased cost of grading the essays would be passed on to the three million students who take the SAT each year.

ETS executives were not available for comment on Wednesday, but Thomas Ewing, a spokesman for the company, said that ETS would still be responsible for "95 percent of the remaining portions of the test."

Furthermore, ETS is only in the second year of a five-year contract with the College Board, and Mr. Caperton said his organization plans to extend the contract after that, calling ETS a "world leader in the creation of tests."

Nevertheless, ETS has dealt with a series of setbacks to its core business over the past few years. In addition to failing to win the contract for the SAT writing test, it will no longer administer the Graduate Management Admission Test after next year. In December, the organization that oversees the business-school entrance examination awarded the GMAT contract instead to ACT Inc. and Pearson VUE, starting in 2006 (The Chronicle, December 11).

ETS also risks losing its contract to provide the high-school exit examination for the State of California; in January, the state's Department of Education began soliciting rival bids for the test.

Over the past year, ETS had some well-publicized technical glitches in reporting test scores. On the same day in May 2002 that College Board officials announced the decision to add another section to the SAT, they also posted an announcement on the organization's Web site informing students that their scores for the SAT II, an essay test, would be delayed.

Another technical problem at ETS delayed SAT scores for about 4,800 students last month, as the company struggled to deal with a computer problem following a programming upgrade, according to Mr. Caperton.

Pearson has had its own problems. In 2002, the company settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of high-school students in Minnesota who erroneously received failing scores on the math portion of a standardized exam required for graduation because Pearson had improperly prepared some testing forms.

Many of the students delayed college or attended summer school because of the mistake.

But David Hankensen, a spokesman for Pearson, said that the incident was "one event several years ago," and that the company had "extensive quality controls in place."

And John S. Katzman, chief executive officer of Princeton Review Inc., a test-preparation company, said the College Board's decision to use Pearson was a step in the right direction regardless of whether that company had better technology than ETS.

"I'm optimistic just because this is the first time the College Board has even put an SAT contract up for bidding," Mr. Katzman said. "It speaks to a much larger issue, because by creating more distance between themselves and ETS, the College Board is putting itself in a position to demand more from them. ... Now they [ETS] have to prove that they can succeed when they actually have competition."

Mr. Katzman said this decision, along with other recent ones made by the College Board, indicates that the College Board is taking more responsibility for the content and quality of the SAT.

Still, critics of standardized testing had a different view.

"This isn't about education or students, it's about money," said Robert A. Schaeffer, the public-education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group. "The College Board is looking for the lowest-cost provider, so what we're seeing here is a race to the bottom that creates grading sweatshops and pressure for evaluators to 'grade as fast as you can.'"