Psychological Support During the YKS and LGS Process: When and How?

YKS (Turkey's university entrance exam) and LGS (the high school entrance exam) are not a single exam day but a marathon of months, often years — packed with adolescence, identity, family expectation, and the feeling of being reduced to a number.

Most families spend their energy on one question: how do we study more? Yet what usually decides the outcome is not how much a student studies but how long they can sustain studying — and that rests on psychological resilience. A student who cannot sleep cannot study well. Past a certain threshold of anxiety, a student cannot solve even the questions they know.

A distinction up front: "psychological support" is an umbrella term covering different professions. Education coaching deals with goals, planning and study behavior — not a clinical intervention. School counseling handles academic and vocational orientation within school. A psychologist works with clinical presentations: anxiety disorders, depressive symptoms, panic attacks. These do not substitute for one another, and knocking on the wrong door lets months pass while the real need goes unmet. I am an education coach, and I will be equally clear about where my scope ends.

What Makes This Process So Heavy?

What we call "exam stress" is four pressures stacked on each other. Duration — a marathon run at sprint pace, so students starting in September hit the wall by January. Competition — with millions of candidates the question shifts from "how much have I learned?" to "how far ahead am I?", which has no answer because the rivals are invisible. Uncertainty — questions, cutoffs and quotas sit outside the student's control. Family expectation — no parent says "I will love you only if you score well," yet many children feel exactly that.

How Do LGS and YKS Differ?

An LGS candidate is a fourteen-year-old meeting their first major selection; abstract thinking, long-term planning and emotional regulation are still maturing — neurodevelopmental reality, not a character flaw. Telling them to "build your own plan" is unrealistic; you build it with them. A YKS candidate faces a heavier question — who am I, and what will I become? — normally answered over years, now compressed into one date. Repeat candidates are a third, fragile group: no school structure, peers already at university.

Who Provides What?

An education coach supports goal clarity, realistic planning and sustainability — not subject teaching, diagnosis or therapy. Coaching assumes the student is functional: attending school, basically operating, but lacking direction or rhythm. When functioning breaks down, that is no longer coaching's domain, and a good coach says so in the first session. A school counselor is the most overlooked resource here: free, familiar with the student over years, fluent in the exam system. A psychologist works with symptoms — a coach asks "what will you do this week?"; a psychologist asks "when did this start, and how is it affecting you?" A psychiatrist is a physician and the only one who can evaluate medically and prescribe; as a coach I do not give medical advice.

When Should Support Begin, and When Is It a Specialist's Job?

The common pattern is to seek help only once things have collapsed — the least effective timing. Coaching-type support pays off most at the start: building ten months correctly beats salvaging the last one. Clinical support should begin when symptoms appear, not after the exam.

If any of these are present, the answer is not a new study plan but a mental health professional: panic attacks; depressive symptoms lasting over two weeks; any thought of self-harm (urgent, never dismissed as attention-seeking); school refusal; collapse of basic self-care. Read this as a threshold, not a diagnostic tool — diagnosis is the specialist's job; mine is to stop when I see it and point to the right door.

Mock Exams and Comparison

A single mock means nothing — only the trend across five does. Its purpose is not to produce a score but to reveal gaps: not "how many did I get right?" but "why was this wrong — did I not know it, was I careless, or did I run out of time?" Social media, meanwhile, is a rigged comparison machine: students measure their real day against someone else's brightest five minutes.

What Is the Parent's Role?

Parents are the most powerful and least used lever here, present far more hours than any coach. What works is disarmingly simple: engaged but without pressure. Do not ask "how many did you get?" at the door, do not compare with the neighbor's child, and do not hand your own anxiety to your child — their own is already enough. A parent's job is not to prepare the child for the exam, but to prepare the environment in which the child can prepare.

After the Result

When the exam ends, everyone relaxes except the student: emptiness first, then a result usually below the dream, then one of the biggest decisions of their life. Two needs must not be confused — space for grief and realistic options. Emotion first, decision after. If low mood persists beyond two weeks, this calls for a specialist.

Support at Alfi

Wherever you are in the marathon, it is never too late to rebuild the process realistically. We work in a way that respects the student's own pace — and when we see a clinical need, we say so plainly and refer you to the right specialist. Explore Education Coaching or book via our appointment page.