I think you are absolutely right about visual arts. It would be helpful for me to find out what percentage of high school visual arts magnet students attended middle school visual arts magnets to figure how much it would hurt DD to not attend the middle school magnet. Interestingly, although all the visual arts magnet assessments include drawing under a time constraint, only one of them requires a portfolio as well.
I think that DS is considering the law/finance magnet partly because it sounds more novel than the science and partly because he wants to follow his parent's footsteps.
