Like the corporate monikers of KFC or AT&T, the initials SAT, denoting the test that has been the scourge of generations of high school students, now stands for nothing, officials with the College Board say.

''Please note that SAT is not an initialism; it does not stand for anything,'' said a statement by the College Board, which since 1941 has administered what was once the Scholastic Aptitude Test and is still part of what it now calls its Scholastic Assessment Tests.

Three years after the name change, the switch is still causing confusion among students, educators and the news media, but experts say that beneath the confusion is an instructive story in academic fashions.

After years of controversy about what its test measures, aptitude or achievement, the College Board in 1994 changed the name of what had been the Scholastic Aptitude Test or S.A.T.