I went to Stuyvesant HS and I believe this is the classic quick fix that wont work. The nice thing about the test is that it is objective, simple to administer, and most of all ensures that all entering students have an educational baseline.

I agree that it's awful that there were very few minorities other than asians while I was there (2001-2005) but introducing a process that allows for favoritism and the introduction of underprepared hard cases will change the nature of the school. There is a certain esprit de corps amongst the students since you know that no matter how shitty someone is doing in a class or how weird they are, you both passed the same hard measuring stick which encourages a baseline respect for your peers. Introducing underprepared students means that teachers will need to expend disproportionate resources on them or they'll just not do well.

The real, and hard fix is that the schools around the city have to do better. That's a hard multilayered problem, but I don't think relaxing standards or replacing objective with subjective measures is the way to go.

For what it's worth, if you allow the school administration to o much leeway in deciding who gets in, bad things will happen. Specialized school administrations are just as shitty as others. It's the student body and teachers that make these places rock. Keeping the test objective will prevent the grubby hands of politically motivated ambitious administrators from screwing things up.