Last month, over 20 students have commited suicide in India, after hearing the results of their exams. About 1 million students took the exams within a two month span and over 350,000 failed, sparking protests from family and friends towards the Board of Intermediate Education. In response to these devastating deaths and scores, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has ordered the recounting and re-verification for all the students who failed.

As of now, over 12 Board of Intermediate Education centers are currently reevaluating the answer sheets of those who failed the exam. Students and parents are anxiously awaiting these results, as they believe that what caused the failures was a mistake made on behalf of the Globarena Technologies Private Limited. This firm had been hired by the Board of Intermediate Education to aid in developing software for the exam results.

This devastating event surfaces a more significant question: how much pressure is too much when it comes school? Why did these students feel like this was their last resort? One test should never be able to determine something so drastic in life. These students took it to themselves to change their lives as they seemed fit because their teachers, their families, and essentially their upbringing, lead them to believe that academics were everything. For a test to hurt so horribly, something must be done in the school’s current environment to assure students that there is a life beyond school. The pressure to do well overwhelmed these students, leading them to take their lives before they truly had a chance to live.