In an annual ritual, hundreds of thousands of students took the SAT this spring as they made their first steps toward applying to college. But they were not the only ones being tested.

Sprinkled among them in May, when the SAT was given for the second time since a much-ballyhooed revamping, were a number of people long past college — members of the test-prep industry who took the exam to see how those changes played out in practice so that they could improve their tutoring services. Armed with perhaps sharper pencils and a more jaundiced eye than the typical 17-year-old, they noticed two questions that some thought could throw off the performance of girls.

Their concerns are fueling a debate in the industry — on Facebook and in private emails — over whether the test items were sufficiently vetted for gender bias, and whether the exam was unfair to female students.

The two items, one in the verbal portion and one in the math section, posed what some test-prep experts considered a textbook example of “stereotype threat.” When people are reminded during a test of a negative stereotype about their race or sex, psychologists say, it creates a kind of test anxiety that leads them to underperform.