When I did my GSCEs I was not stressed really as I was 16, having the time of my life with friends and the exams were the full stop to the end of secondary education. I think with the many exams a 16 year old has sat through, SATs in year 6 and 9 and then mock exams etc it makes the stress factor worse. Many older people do explain that their tests were different and perhaps harder in some ways. Learning to deal with stress as a young adult is a key skill. It does not get any better! But your coping methods can.
Yes, I think that GCSEs are extremely stressful for a large amount of teenagers, not just that, but sometimes the entire course can be too stressful, with coursework, and strict deadlines. I find exams immensely stressful. I have Neurocardiogenic Syncope, which means i faint in certain situations because my blood pressure drops, but I've fainted in a lot of my exams to date and I think there were only 2 of my GCSEs that i didn't faint in, but it doesn't help that I've taken all my courses and exams a year early. But yes a lot of teenagers do badly in exams because they are so stressful, so what exactly are the grades supposed to represent?
Yes they are definitely stressful for all concerned but I am sure they can not be as stressful as they were for us about forty years ago. We did not have the same technology then that the kids of today can use, if we had to look something up that we did not understand we had to go back to the basics of going down to the library, or if you were very lucky looking up the information in encyclopaedias of your own, and knowing which book to look it up in was very stressful in itself. Everybody has stress in their life and children of today are lucky in the fact that they have a lot more help around them in order to keep their stress levels down.
Stressful? You have no idea what stress is! Try rewinding back a few years to when everyone had to do all the research and course work for their GCSE’s the old fashioned way, we did not have the luxury of the internet and computers to help us out. Students these days have no idea how easy they have it. If you cannot handle the stress of a few exams, you are going to find real life, which is when the stress really begins, unbearable.
Education