> If one school out of 100 has a race-blind and merit-based admissions process it will quickly end up with way more discriminated people than the population levels of qualified applicants would suggest, because they are being actively pushed out of the other 99. That is probably how this high school ended up with a 70% Asian figure; I've heard the stereotypes about Asians and math but I doubt the differences are that big.

This does not make sense given TJ and FCPS. There are no other local schools similar to TJ that have similar admissions systems that could exclude asian americans. Further, many people do not believe that the old system was "merit based", given the widespread proliferation of test prep that does not focus on actual knowledge useful for a STEM education but instead focuses on test taking strategies. You can think of the TJ-Test as the LeetCode of high school admissions tests.

When I took the TJ test ~25 years ago it was much like every other standardized test I took in school like the Iowa tests and the SAT, which are generally regarded in the field of education not as measures of mental capacity or scholastic aptitude, but of test prep, whether direct or indirect. Or put another way, they are known to have cultural bias.

Are you saying that the tests were purposefully biased in favor of Asians? Were they written in China so that Asians would have a benefit that lead to 73% demographics at TJ?

Purposefully, no. In the same way that Leetcode style interviews are not purposefully biased in favor of young people.

But there shouldn't be an axiom that standardized testing is the best way to gauge merit and (more controversially) I believe that there shouldn't be an axiom that merit is the most effective way to choose what students have access to accelerated schooling.

Test prep barely works, the entire field of psychometry is dedicated to this topic. How about looking into actual science instead of writing nonsense to justify your racism.

How effective is test prep? That's a serious question because yes, we see a lot of emphasis on it in societies that put a lot of emphasis on tests, but I am not aware of any serious trial of its impact on test scores.