The Pursuit of Excellence Arcadia High School, the academic juggernaut, is one of the most exceptional places I know where students who are not the valedictorian or even one of the 49 Salutatorians still get admitted to Ivy League schools. According to Niche.com, the school's pursuit of excellence ranked them 30th out of more than 1,300 public high schools in California. Arcadia High School's academics are world-class: the average ACT score is 31, the average SAT score is 1340 out of 1600, and at least 35% of students who graduate have taken at least 1 AP test during their time in high school . In terms of UC-connecting schools, Arcadia boasts the largest number of admissions in the University of California system, according to the UC website; in 2015, over 361 students were admitted from a student body of 895. The 2016 graduating class had more than 5 admitted to Harvard, 69 admitted to UC Berkeley, 59 admitted to UCLA, and at least 1 student committed to each school ranked in U.S. News' "10 Best Colleges." The high school's academic results are astonishing, but there is a huge underlying problem behind this success: 68.8% of the students are Asian, but they filled 100% of the class of 2016's student council and 90% of the salutatorian . One parent who graduated from Arcadia High School in 2016 summed up the high school's failure in one sentence: "Non-Asians are the reason our school is ranked so much lower than it should be." The school's administration fails to do its job to encourage all of its students to succeed. Asians rely on their culture of success or punishment to push them into Ivy League schools. On the other hand, African Americans, Hispanics, and even Caucasians do not have such a preponderant success-based culture and often find themselves lost in the Yellow Sea of ​​overachievers, their hopes of achieving excellence fading as time passes. Not to mention, teachers much prefer the easier job of caring for excellent students who already automatically push themselves to succeed over students who need more support and motivation. If Arcadia High School truly wants to achieve excellence and further raise its ranking, it must assist the three groups of students who are the most unmotivated to achieve excellence: those whose dreams are not in the STEM field, those who have need to find their own dreams and those who fail to consider their dreams because they fail to pass their grades. All three groups need administrative and peer support. The school needs to hire more counselors, so that students who need counseling have immediate access. On the one hand, addressing these key issues in high school is the responsibility of Arcadia High School and will promote excellence among all ethnicities in whatever career paths require them. On the other hand, students are equally responsible for their own education. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Motivation drives success, if you are not motivated, it becomes extremely difficult to succeed. As mentioned above, most Asians rely on the culture of success or punishment that motivates them to succeed for the sake of their family's pride and future well-being. Fortunately, in academic terms there are many non-STEM subjects that often motivate students to do well in school, such as art, drama and music. YoyoMa, a famous Asian-American cellist and singer-songwriter, focused on this idea in his essay Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education, strongly promoting the new phrase “STEAM:” Science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. But he believes the arts develop the emotional and empathic intelligence that is fading in our schools, stating that “empathic thinking is something sorely missing in our STEM-only education today” (259). This is an unfortunate reality in numerous low-income cities across the nation, where many high schools are forced to cut funding to arts programs due to budget cuts. But he believed that the arts develop “empathetic thinking [which] is something sorely lacking in our education today” because STEM fields are considered better and more successful than any other field of study (260). Promoting STEAM at Arcadia High School could motivate even more students to succeed in non-science-based careers, which will become viable and respectable to their peers. During my four years at Arcadia High School, the administration slowly began to invest money in arts programs. building a new performing arts center, which now houses the theater and orchestra program. The revamped theater program pushed many of my advanced theater classmates to do well in school because they had to get good grades to be able to act; many of them took advantage of the Chromebook cart donated to the department. That said, Arcadia High School still needs to take a big step forward in promoting arts and non-STEM lessons in its curriculum if it ever wants to achieve excellence for its students and their rankings. On the other side of the spectrum, a less talked about statistic in high school is that Arcadia also sends hundreds of students to community colleges. Contrary to popular belief, a good number of students who end up attending a community college at Arcadia High School did not go because of poor grades; they left because they didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives. This is because the STEM field is not for everyone, but due to Arcadia High School's fierce STEM culture and minimalist 1-course art major requirements, many students will accept a STEM-focused workload and never find a career which they are truly passionate about. Arcadia High School must change the STEM culture that is ingrained in all of its students and classrooms. However, because the high school is predominantly Asian, approximately 70% of the student body, it will be extremely difficult to push Asian Apache Helicopter parents and even the students' peers to accept art and other non-STEM fields as a career choice practicable. Ultimately it will take time for Asians to integrate into American culture, and Wesley Yang, a controversial Korean-American writer, focuses on this problem in Asian culture in his essay Paper Tigers. Yang examines Stuyvesant High School, a competitive public school similar to Arcadia High School in terms of academic achievement and a majority Asian student body. In Asian culture, high school is an exam, as best said by one teacher in the essay, “Learning math is not about learning math…you just learn to pass any standardized test you take” (523). Take the rigorous course so you can pass the AP/SAT test and get into a top 10 college. Unfortunately, this mentality applies to all aspects of high school, best said by my good friend Jackson, "will this be on the AP test?" Asians take AP coursesrigorous, like AP Chemistry, not because they are interested in the subject, but because it seems good for colleges. Unbeknownst to those students, the credits used in a relatively insignificant course could have been better earmarked to help them find a career to pursue. And in cases like Arcadia High School, this culture blinds every student who walks through the gates, who can go to an art school, like Otis, and pursue their dreams in fashion design, or go to UCSD and become a biochemist. so that their peers don't laugh at them. Most students chose the second option. There is also a small hidden population of Arcadia High School students who will never get to choose which college to attend after high school. I was one of them. My grades consisted mostly of Bs, which made my GPA about 3.00. The problem I faced was that approved Asian colleges want at least a 3.7 GPA, so I simply didn't apply to the UC system. Instead, I only applied to two colleges, Cal Poly SLO and Long Beach State, and I didn't get into either. My grades were the direct result of poor decisions in class. I never asked questions or did homework, because homework did not directly benefit our grades and unfortunately many other students fell into the same trap as me. In the classroom environment at Arcadia High School, questions are frowned upon even if you don't understand the lesson; even if the teacher didn't explain a concept well, Asian culture in high school would make you "go home and figure it out." Likewise, students ask themselves, “why do homework if there is no immediate benefit?” These fundamental problems at Arcadia High School lead a handful of students down a path of diminished motivation each year, and many former students are lost in the Community College system due to their poor work habits. If Arcadia High School wants to improve its ranking and achieve excellence, it must motivate students with low grades. Teachers need to take the initiative and talk to low-achieving students, asking them why they are performing poorly and what they can do to help them. My senior English teacher, Mr. Feraco, did this last year because more than 50 students, about a? of all his courses, they did not do well in English and did not graduate; despite many of them already having an extraordinary academic curriculum. Every week in that class they had to hand in two assignments and many students gave up because they hadn't been able to finish the assignment the night before. He taught each class a lesson on time management and decided to allow students to make up missing essays for full credit. If Arcadia High School wants to improve its score, other teachers will have to do the same; they will have to start pushing their students to do well in their classes and sometimes offer their students an olive branch to get out of their situations. They must foster an atmosphere that allows for questions and discussions on the topic at hand. This will help students understand the topic better and encourage them to do their homework, which in turn will help them do well on the test. Likewise, students need to take initiative and change the classroom environment. When teachers promote participation in the classroom, students must take advantage of the opportunity. If they don't understand something at the beginning of the lesson, they should ask questions immediately. Additionally, many students, especially Asian ones, will need to express themselves through facial expressions. Yang even mentioned this in his few.