Since Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed changing how students are admitted to eight of the city’s most elite public high schools on June 3, the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, or SHSAT, has been subject to intense public debate.

The proposal comes as city officials grapple with the low number of black and Latino students admitted to specialized high schools. Only 10 percent of New York City’s public school students who are black or Latino received offers to attend a specialized high school last year, even though 67 percent of New York public school students are black or Latino. Asians make up 62 percent of students at specialized high schools and white students make up 24 percent, though only 16 percent of public school students are Asian and 15 percent are white.

So what are specialized high schools?

New York City has nine specialized high schools, which offer a more rigorous curriculum than most other public high schools in the city. The schools are intended to serve the needs of students who excel academically and artistically, according to the Department of Education. The schools are:

Bronx High School of Science

The Brooklyn Latin School

Brooklyn Technical High School

High School of American Studies at Lehman College, in the Bronx

High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, in Manhattan

Queens High School for the Sciences at York College

Staten Island Technical High School

Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan

The ninth school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, on the Upper West Side, uses student auditions and academic records, not SHSAT scores, to determine admissions.

How do students get accepted into a specialized high school?

Each of the eight schools that require the test has a cutoff score — a minimum score that students must get to be offered a seat. The test is scored out of 800, but the cutoff scores for each school vary each year. The scores are determined by the Department of Education based on the number of applicants and the number of seats available at each school. Official cutoff scores are not released publicly, but based on information compiled by parents and students, Stuyvesant High School typically has the highest cutoff score, and the Brooklyn Latin School, one of five specialized schools created during the Bloomberg administration, has typically had the lowest.