From Leaving CertiFiCate to Leaving SChooL a Longitudinal Study ...

Academic Stress and the Leaving Certificate 85
You don’t think about it [the Leaving Certificate exams] when
you’re in fifth year at all, you should be doing exam papers and stuff
in school but you don’t do any of that. (Harris Street, girls’ school,
middle-class intake)
Similarly, students in Fig Lane, another middle-class school, discussed
how they were already showing signs of stress and felt that they would
become increasingly stressed as the exams approach:
I know I definitely will be stressed coming up close to it and I know it
starts in basically a month … I think it’s incredibly stressful, oh I’m
just so stressed about it. (Fig Lane, coed school, middle-class itnake)
It would seem that failure to achieve their expectations (their first
choice) would result in negative esteem judgements for these students.
For some students, the fear of failure is so great that they place enormous
pressure on themselves causing panic, often limiting the amount of work
they can do:
It’s all I want, there’s always back ways in and everything but it’s
just, when you really, really want it, it can make you panicky about it
but I can’t really panic, if I’m not doing the work so. (Fig Lane, coed
school, middle-class intake)
Some students felt their stress was associated with their teachers’ capacity
to ‘cover’ the curriculum in time, an issue over which they had no control:
You start panicking because you’re afraid the teachers haven’t covered
everything.
Because I know like in History I’ve got like an entire topic left to
cover… so I’m kind of worried. (Fig Lane, coed school, middle-class
intake)
This frustration with teachers was also evident among students from
Belmore Street, who were concerned that courses had not been ‘finished’
in some subjects:
Sometimes you feel like going ‘oh my god like, do you realise how
close the exams are like’. We haven’t even finished our course in a