The Pressure to Get Good Grades

“Pressure by parents and schools to achieve top scores has created stress levels among students,” said Denise Pope, who is a senior lecturer at Stanford University. A number of different factors could come from the constant pressure of high schoolers to get good grades. Parents can push their children to do their best and excel in school, or students could push themselves to do their hardest work because they don’t want to have a future with no education after high school and no financial support. This extensive amount of stress is being put on the student, and they could experience serious problems that affect their physical and mental health. An oversupply of homework could even cause students to experience burnout and cause them to be more likely to cheat on homework and assignments because they think that they need to do anything they can to get that 4.0 GPA.

The pressure put on students by parents and schools to get the best grades has caused such large stress levels in students, that some professors and educators are calling it an epidemic. Parents are going to naturally want their children to do well in school, but the problem arises when they apply extreme amounts of pressure on the student. With these large levels of stress being put on students, they can start to feel like they have too much work and not enough time, which begins to lessen the students free time. Having no free time in the day makes it to where they may never get a chance to release this stress and tension that has built up. If a student struggles with this for a long period of time, it can, then, cause them to lose sleep, which leads to physical exhaustion, causing them to be less attentive during class and fall even more behind than they already are. Stress not only affects your sleeping patterns, but also affects your immune system, making it harder to get rid of and fight off illnesses and infections.

Denise Pope shadowed five high achieving students for one year