Hundreds of thousands of students are waiting nervously for their GCSE results, writes Laine Smith.

After two years of stress, anxiety and extreme pressure, we have to ask ourselves one question: is it all worth it?

As one of these students, my opinion is that GCSEs are useless in that they teach young people that the more you can memorise, the more successful you’re likely to be in life.

The General Certificate of Secondary Education is a qualification typically awarded to secondary school students here and in the UK, except Scotland.

I consider GCSEs to be bad in a number of ways. My personal opinion is that they are boring, under stimulating and, arguably, uninteresting.

Students should be able to enjoy the content they’re learning. Without fun or interest, the effort that is put in to a subject will be minimal, and students won’t allow themselves be either spontaneous or creative in their learning.

Ultimately, this leads to one thing: an overload of stress and pressure.

We can blame Michael Gove, but the new GCSEs are proving to be just too hard, with concerns for students’ mental health coming into view.

On the other hand, nobody can argue that GCSEs are completely useless. The exams give students a chance to see how they work under pressure, considering their workload.

Another benefit is that they do provide some building blocks for the future. A few aspects of subjects such as maths and English that are taught in lessons may be used for the rest of people’s lives, and some of it is helpful in learning how to be a functional adult.

Finally, GCSEs can be the key to opening doors for sixth form and university, therefore being quite significant for higher education.

But are the courses truly necessary? They don’t tend to teach students about independent study; most of their learning is spoon-fed from their teachers.

For some subjects, coursework is required for a percentage of a student’s final grade. While coursework is slowly being eradicated from the system, it still remains a prevalent part of many subjects today.

Why is that a problem? Coursework is widely regarded as a ’cheat’s charter’, as most coursework that is handed in isn’t a student’s original work; part of a pupils final grade isn’t the grade they deserve.

The element that gets to me the most is that while young people are getting an education, they aren’t being educated.

English is an example of what I mean by this. Students are required to analyse texts and write essays, yet many don’t know anything about sentence structures, parts of speech or anything that they should actually know.

To add to this, recreational reading is becoming more and more uncommon among young people, with films and audio books taking over, and also the fact that books are being shoved down their throats and they’re now being forced to learn and analyse them.

This goes back to my previous point about how, if you take the fun out of learning, students aren’t going to be willing to learn.

My view is that we should dispose these specific exams completely.

I believe that students should be given the option to take one of two qualifications: one for those who are planning to go straight into employment, and another for those planning to go into higher education.

At the very least, if we can’t get rid of them completely, why must they be sat all at once?

I think that schools could try something different; the GCSE qualification should start in year nine, splitting more of the exams over the course of the next two years.

Students of the new generation are too pressurised, and it’s time to change that.

â?¢ Laine, aged 16, spent a week at Isle of Man Newspapers on work experience in the newsroom.