A high stress certificate
Female students feel most pressure as exams approach in unique year
FEMALE Year 12 students are struggling to deal with the disruptions of 2020 more than their male peers, with new data revealing more than half are worried about their mental health going into final exams.
Many soon-to-be graduates are “frustrated” by the impacts of the pandemic on final exams. Research released by DrinkWise found almost half of female students are “crying a lot”.
“There’s been no access to the library or our teachers, we’ve had tech difficulties with Zoom and we feel disadvantaged by the pandemic,” Brianne He, a student from
Brigidine College in Sydney, said. “We check in with each other if we are feeling down, we go grab some food, we rely on the group chat, but we don’t know what’s going to happen yet so we feel very uncertain.”
A staggering 70 per cent of Year 12 girls are feeling stressed or anxious about preparing for the exams and 47 per cent are “worried about the world in general”.
For young men those figures come in at 55 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.
The survey found 53 per cent of female students were worried about their mental health compared to 34 per cent for males.
One third of students say they wouldn’t be comfortable accessing support services and only 4 per cent have accessed professional help.
Young Australians will be among the hardest hit by the pandemic downturn as jobs and opportunities are wiped away for years, numerous studies have warned.
Charlotte Di Lorenzo, a student from Sydney school St Clare’s College Waverley, has been bouncing between libraries with her friends trying to find a place that won’t kick them out after two hours.
She is considering becoming a lawyer but the “economic burden” caused by the pandemic has her worried, as does the future structure of Australia’s crippled universities.
“I’ve heard about (plans) to raise uni fees for humanities and law, that’s the area I’m looking into so there may be a lot of debt,” she said.
Ms Di Lorenzo, like many students surveyed, felt the impact of COVID-19 when it came to 18th birthdays, formals and graduation ceremonies.
“We had our graduation over zoom and I’m the eldest so mum just had to watch over a computer,” she said.
DrinkWise launched a campaign, You Got This, to try to reassure Year 12s as they face exam pressure.
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