Ask any group of high school students what the three most panic-inducing, anxiety-ridden, freak out-worthy letters in the English language are, and chances are you’ll hear the same answer over and over again.

SAT. Yes, that SAT, that 3 hour and 45 minute long essay-writing and answer-bubbling marathon most college-bound teenagers will sacrifice at least one Saturday morning to sit through and complete, frantic with the knowledge that this test has the possibility to decide their future.

The fear, dread, and loathing that accompany the College Board’s high-stakes college admission test are well known among students, parents, and guidance counselors. In an era where college admissions requirements are getting tighter every year, a high score on the SAT can be the difference between an acceptance letter offering financial aid and a heartbreaking rejection letter from a dream college.

With so much on the line, high school students and their parents have increasingly turned to expensive test prep services and tutors. While the cost of some of these services can be suspect, there is value in preparing for the SAT, says College and Career Center counselor William Travers.

“A sports team would never go into a competition without practicing extensively. A musician would never go into a concert without putting in a lot of time and preparation,” said Travers.  Similarly, he said, a student shouldn’t go into the SAT without taking the time to gain knowledge of the inner workings of such an important test.

“Before you go into a high stakes test, you have to know how they ask the questions and how they score the test. Sometimes, that’s as important as the content you learn,” Travers said.

Every year, millions of students take SAT prep courses in hopes of cracking the SAT code. SAT preparation is a $4 million a year industry, with some classes and private tutors costing hundreds of dollars per session. For those who can afford it, test prep is worth the price if it brings an increase in SAT scores by hundreds of points, as some tutoring services claim.

“Things like the SAT, they’re what I call objective criteria,” said Travers. “If you have two kids who are practically equal [in every other area admissions counselors look at], sometimes SAT scores can be a deciding factor.”

The importance of SAT scores is certainly well known to students as they work through the college admissions process.

“[SAT] scores matter so much,” said Lilianna Ly, a junior at North Penn who took an SAT prep course. “[Your scores] set you apart from other people in the college admissions process, especially if you don’t have a lot of extracurricular activities. You have to set yourself apart in some way.”

Sometimes, setting yourself apart through your standardized test scores takes up as much time as an extracurricular activity. For Ly, her prep courses, which she attended 2 nights a week for three weeks, were a “grueling” prospect after a long day of school.

“After going to school, I had to go [to SAT prep] and do three more hours of school… I was just brain dead by that time,” she explained.

Travers echoed the sentiment of the exhaustion of weeknight SAT prep courses. “If your prep class is for three hours on a weeknight, what happens to your academics? What about your schoolwork?” He went on to say that the ideal time for students to take SAT prep courses is during the summer or on weekends.

“But then it becomes a matter of, do students want to put in all of that time?”

The time spent preparing for the SAT and the money that accompanies it is often a deciding factor in whether or not a student takes an SAT prep course. For students already pressed for time by after-school jobs, activities, sports, and homework, the prospect of spending hours a day preparing for one test is daunting.

The preparation problem is so great that even the College Board, the nonprofit company that administers the SAT, has acknowledged it in a big way: beginning in March 2016, the SAT will be redesigned for the first time in 11 years.

The new test will focus more on what students are learning in school, eliminating obscure vocab words and implementing Common Core-style questions into the exam. As College Board president David Coleman told the New York Times, the redesigned test will “send a message to students that studying their course material in high school, not taking extracurricular test-prep courses that tend to focus on test-taking skills, is the way to do well on admission tests and succeed in a rigorous college curriculum.”

The hope for the new SAT is that it will eliminate the startlingly clear correlation between family income and test scores. The correlation that currently exists is so great that it was mocked by comedian Stephen Colbert, who half-jokingly proclaimed that the best way the ace the SATs was to spend a lot of money, declaring that “if you want an edge, you get what your mom and dad pay for.”

There is truth to Colbert’s claim: students whose families make over $200,000 a year score, on average, almost 400 points higher (out of 2400) than students whose families make less than $20,000 a year. While the new SAT may lessen this gap, it will take more than differently worded questions on a standardized test to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students that exists in all aspects of education and society as a whole.

The College Board has taken some steps to attempt to alleviate the differences in test prep between income levels: students taking the redesigned SAT will be able to prepare for free online through Khan Academy.

“For too long, there’s been a well-known imbalance between students who [can] afford test-prep courses and those who [can’t],” Sal Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy, said on the College Board website. “We’re thrilled to collaborate closely with the College Board to level the playing field by making truly world-class test-prep materials freely available to all students.”

For now, however, students will continue to spend time and money preparing for the SAT, whether they hire expensive private tutors, attend prep courses, of self-study from the dozens of SAT prep books available online or in bookstores. And those students who study the inner workings of the SAT will surely be rewarded with higher scores and an edge in the college admissions process over those who rely only on what they’ve learned in school.

“That SATs are supposed to be a test of what you already know, not what someone can teach you in three months to cram for the test,” said Ly.

The hope of the redesigned SAT is just that: a test that assesses knowledge, not test-taking skills. With any luck, the College Board will succeed in their mission and start to level the playing field that seems to be growing increasingly uneven earlier and earlier in life.