The SAT is to college admission …

“As a root canal is to a dentist?” said Peter Lee, 16. He and several other weary-looking high school students had just emerged from a four-hour SAT prep class in Glendale, Calif.

“As a root canal is to a patient?” suggested Emin Gharibian, 17.

Neither of those worked for Anthony Kwon, 16. “As a root canal is to pain,” he said.

Pain is typically the refrain when college-bound youngsters jaw about the SAT. But some relief is coming. This month, University of California regents approved plans for a revamped SAT that will eliminate its long-maligned analogy section, after more than 70 years of torturing the correlation-challenged.

Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, had railed against the analogies — which account for 19 of the SAT’s 72 verbal questions — as a memory drill that measures little of a student’s potential. He threatened to scrap the SAT as a UC requirement unless the test makers replaced the multiple-choice analogies with reading comprehension questions, added a writing exercise and expanded the math portion.

The College Board, the New York-based company that owns the SAT, gave Atkinson what he wanted. And no wonder: The UC is to the board as General Motors is to U.S. Steel — a huge customer. The analogies will disappear in 2005.

“I’m extremely pleased,” Atkinson said. “I always just hated the verbal analogies. There was just a trickiness to them.”

Amy Schmidt, the College Board’s executive director for educational research, agreed.

“They’re puzzlelike. They don’t really test anything you learn in school,” she said. “I’m not heartbroken that they are going.”

But she also said the analogies assess reasoning skills, helping the SAT as a whole to identify promising students.

“The SAT is to college admission as an NCAA scholarship is to the big leagues,” Schmidt said. “It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

Not according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which contends the SAT is biased against lower-income students and those for whom English is a second language. As evidence, Robert Schaeffer, center public education director,cited several analogy questions, including this one, since deleted:

Runner: Marathon

A) envoy: embassy

B) martyr: massacre

C) oarsman: regatta

D) referee: tournament

E) horse: stable

The answer was C.

“That’s incredibly culturally centered,” Schaeffer said. “You don’t see a regatta in center-city L.A.; you don’t see it in Appalachia; you don’t see it in New Mexico.”

Among the other analogy words Schaeffer slammed were “pirouette” and “hack,” as in writer. “Is ‘pirouette’ a word most high schoolers would use?” he said. “And ‘hack’ used to be associated with cabs.”

He likened the SAT to a trivia test.

That’s too harsh, said George Mills, vice president for enrollment at the University of Puget Sound. He argued against ditching the analogies while serving as a College Board trustee.

“It’s disappointing to see them go,” he said.

Mills said the questions reflected the practice of drawing analogies that college professors frequently employ in their lectures. He also favors the teaching of Latin. “I’m old-school,” he said.

This isn’t the first time the College Board has tossed the analogies. It scratched them in 1930, four years after the SAT’s debut, then restored them in 1936.