August 2, 1985

The Manville Corporation said yesterday that it had tentatively agreed to a plan that could clear the way for billions of dollars of payments to asbestos victims and help the company emerge from bankruptcy proceedings. Lawyers for some of the asbestos victims hailed the decision as a breakthrough in the complex dispute. ''Manville has never before been willing to agree on an acceptable financial package, and seems willing to do so now,'' said Robert J. Rosenberg, a lawyer who represents some of the plaintiffs in the case. Curtis Linke, a Manville spokesman, said that the proposal agreed to by senior management requires the approval of the company's board of directors. The board met yesterday and was expected to conclude its consideration of the plan today. Any agreement also would have to be approved by a number of other parties, including a bankruptcy court.

Two companies that say they help students raise their scores on College Board examinations, in some cases by hundreds of points, have been temporarily barred from using material from the tests themselves. The order restraining the companies, pending further hearings, was issued by Judge Maryanne Trump Barry in Federal District Court in Trenton at the request of the Educational Testing Service, which adminsters the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The testing service charged in court Tuesday that one company, Princeton Review, and a smaller company, Pre-Test Review, used questions improperly taken from ''secure'' tests not intended to be in the public domain. At issue are the tests, taken by 1.7 million high school students a year, that often determine which students are admitted to the country's leading colleges. And, as more students have sought coaching in recent years, the debate has grown over what effect such aid can have in raising scores.

TO many people, a pop song equals four catchy minutes of truisms about love. Since the 1960's, however, many songwriters have decided to circumvent the cliches. Dark lyrics with light tunes, character studies from bizarre points of view, irony, alienation, paradox and the whole Pandora's box of literary distancing devices have moved into pop - and that's not to mention the musical twists. Formula songwriting isn't dead, but it's no longer the only game in town. This weekend brings three songwriters to New York who have private agendas for this most public of forms. Graham Parker, who will lead his band, the Shot, tomorrow at Pier 84, channels political and personal outrage into songs about, among other things, religious zealots and nuclear holocaust. The East German singer Nina Hagen, who will perform tomorrow at the Beacon Theater, tears into songs with a multifarious voice and a willingness to throw just about anything into the mix. And the British songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who is returning tonight to Irving Plaza, writes snappy little fantasies about insects, people with ''lightbulb heads'' and other aberrant images - all encapsulated in formally perfect pop songs.

The Federal Reserve Board today denied Citicorp permission to buy a bank in South Dakota that is involved in the insurance underwriting business. The decision amounted to a ruling that bank holding companies cannot lawfully enter the insurance industry, under Federal law as it reads now. Under South Dakota law, banks chartered by that state are permitted to engage in all aspects of the insurance business. South Dakota is the only state with such a law. The bank that Citicorp wanted to buy is the American State Bank, of Rapid City.

Sakowitz, the fashion specialty store that has catered to the tastes and foibles of generations of wealthy Texans, filed for protection from creditors today under Chapter 11 of the Federal bankruptcy law. One of the last great family-owned department store chains in the United States, the 83-year-old company cited troubles in the oil and gas industry as the main reason for the action. The chain had grown rapidly in the late 1970's and early 80's to 11 major department stores and 6 boutiques in Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona, during the great oil boom that ended abruptly in 1982. In retrospect, that expansion was a mistake, said Robert T. Sakowitz, the 46-year-old chairman and chief executive in an interview shortly after his lawyers filed the bankruptcy papers. ''One of the strategies we employed was to follow the natural-resource industry,'' he said. ''We would go to places we thought were recession proof.''