Academic Stress and Coping Strategies among Pre-university Students: a Comparative Study

Stress is a perceived imbalance between demand and response capability under conditions and where failure to meet demands has important consequences. The forces are either within the person or within the environment that affect the individual. For academic excellence as well as taking advantage of future opportunities that come in the way of one's life learning is important. Particularly it assumes a great importance at 11th and 12th standard. Based on this a need was felt to study academic stress among PUC students. So, 360 pre-university students of both boys and girls were selected by using random sampling method from four co-educational colleges of Dharwad. Stress event test by Bhagwatar (2000) and coping strategies inventory developed by investigator was used. The results revealed that second year PUC students and male student significantly had higher academic stress than first years and female students irrespective of all faculties. Arts and Commerce students of first year had lesser stress than second year students of arts and commerce unlike science students where in both first and second year stress was similar. It was observed that a highest percentage of students employed one or the other coping strategies to manage stress.