In Quartz Hill High School, students are capable of showing exemplary skills in a variety of different academic and extracurricular activities. The level of competition is high enough that, in most instances, students must put in the extra effort to succeed regardless of what their ambitions may be. For example, the large number of students participating in sports at Quartz Hill makes it so that students must work extremely hard to even stand a chance at making it on the varsity team. In this same manner, students must always push themselves to keep up with the increasing workload by teachers. However, as the years go by, each class has less of a competitive edge because of the shortage of award ceremonies. Aside from the often overlooked GPA awards and the Valedictorian awards at the end of Senior year, there are very few credible award ceremonies that reward specific students based on their accomplishments.

In elementary and middle school, there was typically a day of recognition at the end of each semester aside from the standard GPA awards ceremony. Rather than recognizing a large group of students for succeeding in the same task, the ceremony would reward specific students for a special achievement that they managed to accomplish. Hillview Middle School, for instance, would offer students department awards from their teachers based on who they believed were the most accomplished students in their classes. Elementary schools in the AV also had an award ceremony rewarding kids in each class for academic achievement, all-round achievement, and many other commendations. Regardless of the achievement being awarded, students who received these certificates and those who did not receive them felt motivated to either continue their work habits or improve them.

It is often argued that having too many award ceremonies will give students a false sense of what to expect in the real world and that once students reach the stage where they must work, they may lose their sense of motivation because there is no trophy to influence their decisions. Award assemblies are also believed to take away from the idea of developing a more supportive and collaborative school community. While these arguments are valid in some regard, the only time these issues come into play is when there are too many individual awards. Considering the lack of individual award ceremonies within Quartz Hill High School, it wouldn’t hurt to incorporate one for the sake of motivating academic and extracurricular achievement. For many students sinking “under the radar,” these meetings of recognition are beneficial because they will also indicate whether their efforts are sending them in the right direction.

Another issue that is often mentioned with award ceremonies is how many students are undeservingly given recognition. The idea of a participation award comes to mind, with students getting medals or certificates simply for trying. However, this shouldn’t take away from the fact that there are a select group of students who are actually deserving of acknowledgment. Hosting an award ceremony that distributes only a few awards for the most accomplished students will help to establish higher standards at Quartz Hill. It will also give the recipients of the awards a sense of pride for their accomplishments. However, in order to establish such an award ceremony, bias should be taken out of the equation. There are many ways to do this, but incorporating a non-biased selection process is often difficult unless the teachers distributing these awards base their decisions on numerical data. This challenge is something that must definitely be taken into consideration before such formalities are implemented.

Quartz Hill undoubtedly has a plethora of high-achieving students in the fields of academics, sports, music, drama, etc. However, the school does very little to award these students for their achievements, and it would be beneficial to incorporate such assemblies to award the top performing students each semester. There are also certain issues that should be taken into consideration before the idea of hosting more of such meetings is put into practice. Nevertheless, issues such as bias can be limited and the prospect of having more awarding pomps should definitely be considered.