I went to TJ from 2003-2007, and it was a majority white/Caucasian not Asian (unless it changed in just the last five or six years).
It certainly was pretty competitive and serious, but really it was what you made of it. I heard alumni rants about it going downhill after I left, so maybe that's something that happened by 2010 or it's just a consequence of what people say after they leave. There have been some critical newspaper articles about TJ in the last few years.
I graduated in 2002, which was the same year FCPS moved to a race-blind admissions system. I remember because there was a lot of consternation about that year's freshman class having a single black girl out of 450 students or so. My class was at most 30% asian, maybe 25%. So it was a pretty dramatic shift over 10 years to the current composition: http://www.tjprep-va.com/TJ_Admission_Stats_from_2005-2010.p..., http://www.fcps.edu/cco/pr/tj/tjadmissions0412.pdf.
I think it's more than just alumni griping. I loved my experience there, but TJ was a very different place in 2002 than it was in 1998. In 1998, the school had the original principal, Geoff Jones. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about him that the Chinese government donated a bunch of money for a Chinese language lab, and he just spent the money on other projects. He did an incredible job of keeping FCPS out of our hair. His replacement sucked (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...). She was that typical kind of educator that used the word "special" a lot. My brother (2004-2008), indicated that he seemed to think there was a lot more competition and less collegiality than when I was there.
On the other hand I think to a degree the asians are taking a lot of the heat for other problems with the school. The period of changing demographics just happens to be correlated with the period during which FCPS exerted more influence over the school.
Thanks for the links. And you're right, she did say "special" and the overall atmosphere was one of competitiveness. I think cheating is a problem at any school, but at TJ it might just be done a little differently. I was so shocked to hear that a student broke into the teachers' computers to change his already high grades to grades that were slightly higher. I think he got caught and ended up not being able to go to some of the schools he got accepted to. I don't think this is indicative of a cheating culture, like I said all schools have some percentage of students who cheat (even if it's small), but it's interesting to hear the degree of pressure on students. Definitely strange when you hear about cheating to have even higher grades rather than cheating "just to get by" as you'd normally be accustomed to at schools.
Wow, that's a big change in representation. I thought rayiner was mentioning more about after he left, but actually those are the percentages now and have changed dramatically in the last five years.
I'm questioning if I would even get in at this point (my work ethic always beat out my test scores). I'm wondering if this rigidity to "scores" is helping things -- I probably would have to agree with the author's assessment of a "robotic student" molding themselves to what the TJ admissions office wants.
According to that link, the incoming freshman class is 64.2% Asian, not the school as a whole. It does state that they're a majority but doesn't say by how much.
It certainly was pretty competitive and serious, but really it was what you made of it. I heard alumni rants about it going downhill after I left, so maybe that's something that happened by 2010 or it's just a consequence of what people say after they leave. There have been some critical newspaper articles about TJ in the last few years.