There's a particular kind of dread that has nothing to do with the exam itself. It arrives after the paper is over, while the result is still pending, when a student starts rehearsing how the conversation at home will go if the number isn't good enough. Not "what did I get wrong." Not "what do I do differently next time." Just: how do I say this out loud, and to whom, and in what order.
That dread is really about two separate failures, stacked on top of each other. The first is the exam. The second, and often the harder one, is walking through the front door afterwards.
Hidden Cost of Pressure
Start with what the exam can do on its own, before anyone at home says a word. Pakistan keeps no official suicide registry, so nobody can say with real precision how much the pressure to perform costs students each year. What data does exist points in one consistent direction. A review of medical student suicides recorded over a ten-year span found academic failure to be the single most common trigger, and most of the students who died were in their clinical years, the stage of training when workload and expectation both peak at once.
A daughter who underperforms often hears an accusation—as though her failure retroactively proves the family took an unnecessary risk by educating her
Earlier this year, a teenager in Karachi died by suicide after his father reacted angrily to a poor result on a school exam. It made news not because it was unusual, but because it was recognisable. Swap the city and the surname, and the same story could belong to almost any household in the country.
Failure as a Financial Debt
This is where the second failure begins, and it rarely takes the shape of a conversation. A student who fails doesn't just have to live with the result. He has to hand it over to people who have spent money on tuition, coaching, and fees, and who have been keeping count the entire time, whether they say so or not.
"After all this money" is not a rare thing to hear in a Pakistani home once a result disappoints. It is close to a script at this point. And it does something specific to the failure: it turns it into debt. Not simply an academic setback, but a financial betrayal, as though the child owed a return on an investment and defaulted on it.
Most parents do not mean this as cruelty. Many are genuinely stretched, and school and university fees are not a small line item for most households here. But intention does not change what a child hears, which is that their worth is now being measured against rupees spent, and that they have come up short on both counts at once. Add to this the fact that most parents keep their own failures private, and a young person grows up assuming failure is rare and uniquely theirs, unaware that almost everyone who eventually succeeded also has a long list of things that did not work out first.
The weight isn't shared equally, either. A son who underperforms is usually told to try harder next time. A daughter who underperforms more often hears something closer to an accusation—that this is exactly why people said she should not have been sent to study in the first place, as though her failure retroactively proves the family took an unnecessary risk by educating her at all. The same result, read as two different verdicts, depending entirely on who it happened to.
Making Room for Failure
None of this produces better students. It produces frightened ones. Some stop attempting anything that carries real risk of failure and settle instead for the safest, most forgettable option available, the one that guarantees no bad news to deliver at dinner. Others simply stop telling the truth about their results for as long as they can manage it. What gets lost in both cases is the actual point of education, which was never supposed to be an unbroken run of good marks. It was supposed to be a process people are allowed to be bad at sometimes, on the way to getting better at it.
None of this requires a grand policy fix, though the country's near-total absence of student mental health infrastructure, and its refusal to track suicide data nationally at all, would be a reasonable place to start. It starts smaller than that, inside individual homes. Ask what happened before asking what people will think. Say out loud, at some point, that you failed at something too. Keep the fee conversation separate from the worth conversation, because a child is not a loan that either performs or defaults.
Failure isn't the crisis. It never was. The crisis is a culture with no room for it, and children who learn, long before they have the words for it, that being ordinary, even once, is the one result they cannot afford to bring home.
Readers struggling with their own mental health can reach Umang, a free and confidential 24/7 helpline, at 0311-7786264.