Was there a secondary adjustment step to finalize admit/deny? Your heatmap-based method would almost certainly result in an unacceptable racial composition of the class.
I worked in the underrepresented student office, so I was keenly aware/curious about that possibility when I began. However, after reviewing thousands of applications, my experience, to my surprise, was that GPA to SAT/ACT scores remained highly correlated regardless of race. If memory serves (and it’s been awhile) the outliers who were more likely to have higher SAT/ACT than their GPA normally suggested, tended to come from predominantly non-white schools. I’ve seen so many reports to the contrary that this surprised me to no end, but that’s what I observed.
I see your point on the GPA/test correlation and that is good in that it reflects that grade inflation wasn’t a major problem while you worked there.
But my question about final admit/deny stands. If you look at the racial distribution of the upper performers of any standardized exam (your “heatmap tracing”), it is unlikely to me that a college would be fine with that class composition. Either there must be a secondary layer where your admit/deny’s are adjusted or your acceptance rate must be very high.