Two seventeen-year-old girls took their own lives in Athens, in fear of failing their university entrance exams. Two children who never got the chance to grow up, to change their minds about themselves, to discover that a life cannot be measured by a grade or a university application form. And alongside the grief and the shock, a question returns — one that we as a society persistently refuse to look in the eye. How much weight have we actually loaded onto our children’s shoulders?
University entrance exams have been sold for decades as the great battle that will determine a person’s future. Families agonise, schools pile on the pressure, tutoring centres multiply the hours and the demands, and society as a whole treats exam success as virtually synonymous with personal worth. A seventeen-year-old learns to believe that failing this test means failing as a human being. That is one of the most dangerous lies we have normalised.
The exams themselves are not the culprit. Every society needs processes of assessment. The problem begins when a single test takes on the dimensions of an existential crisis. When a child never hears that they have the right to fail, to try again, to take a different path, to take their time, to not yet know what they want. When they grow up in an environment where comparison is the daily backdrop and love often feels like something that has to be earned through performance.
We live in an age when teenagers are already navigating levels of psychological pressure that have no historical precedent. Social media amplifies anxiety, feeds the constant need for validation, and turns self-assessment into a never-ending loop. Failure is no longer experienced privately — it feels public, exposed, almost shameful. In that environment, exam pressure becomes unbearable for some children. Not dramatic. Unbearable.
But this conversation cannot be allowed to last only a few days of collective emotion after a tragedy. What we owe these children — and the ones still here — is a change of mindset. We need to stop talking about the Pancyprian Examinations as though they are the only gateway to a life worth living. We need to make genuine room for second chances and alternative routes. Above all, we need to teach our children that their worth is not determined by their results, and is not cancelled by a failure.
And there is something else. We need to listen more. Behind the grades and the test papers, there are children who are frightened, exhausted, quietly fighting anxiety and depression. Adolescent mental health cannot keep being treated as a secondary concern, or as a luxury.
No exam is worth a human life. And no society can regard it as normal to raise children who believe that at seventeen, everything has already been decided — permanently, irreversibly, forever.
