Determining the academic stress and coping mechanisms of the students allows for a broad understanding of how the online learning environment affects the students' present education. As a result, the researchers adjudged that it was important to find out how the students cope with stress in online learning when the COVID-19 pandemic is present. The researchers considered tertiary freshmen as respondents of the study since they were the ones who made a big shift from basic education to higher education. The results indicate that deadlines were a major source of stress for most of the respondents while attending online classes was a moderately stressful experience for most of the respondents. "Acceptance" earned the highest mean score among the facets of coping strategies, which corresponds to "I've been doing this a medium amount". Students can accept the fact that a specific circumstance has occurred, and they've had to acquire ways of coping with it. But despite their acceptance of the COVID-19 scenario, students still have inhibitions because they want to return to the face-to-face education environment in the future. Lastly, as the students experience stress often, the more that they are using many coping strategies at once. In order to cope with the pandemic, one may want to use several of the coping strategies or to alternate in using them. [The publication year (2022) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year is 2023.]