How has mental health been affected by grades?

Students of AF High are drastically being affected by the pressure of grades. After conducting interviews with multiple students this week, there is one thing abundantly clear, grades and school overall makes them anxious. 

When interviewing these students, they were all asked the same exact question, ¨How do grades impact your mental health¨. And collectively everyone said that grades made them anxious. Natalee Steele, Class of 2022 stated that “school makes her feel anxious and feels as though that my grades define me as a person¨. Schools tend to put tons of pressure on students when it comes to school making them feel less of themselves and stressed if they don’t have perfect grades. This is detrimental to these students when they feel as though in order to be considered smart or successful they have to have perfect grades. Dejana white, Class of 2022 states that school is very hard and stressful on her and most of the time she lacks motivation due to all the pressure that she faces when it comes to grades and having to keep up. 

Grades force students to not make many mistakes since one mistake that the student makes is reflected heavily in their report card. The issue with this grading system is that students worry about their grades because students work very hard to get a perfect grade and make no mistakes that can cause their grades to go down. There has been evidence that there is a negative impact on mental health caused by grades from a website that specialize on student’s mental health. Newport Institute did a study from 2019 that gets info of what Academic Pressure does to the mental health of students such as, “Depression, Increased substance abuse, poor sleep quality, high level stress and burnout, and etc.” Although this study was made in 2019, students now still feel these emotions from the Academic Pressure that grades have on them which makes them repeat the process of damaging their mental health just so the students get what they want on their report card. Newport Institute also added that more than 59 percent of students were often worried about taking tests, 37 percent were worried when studying, and 35 percent of college students reported having anxiety symptoms and 30 percent reported suffering from depression. As a result, students’ mental health gets heavily impacted by Academic pressure everyday no matter what.