You are asking Jackson to parse a StudentList. Tell it to parse a List (of students) instead. Since List is generic you will typically use a TypeReference

List<Student> participantJsonList = mapper.readValue(jsonString, new TypeReference<List<Student>>(){});

ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();     
JSONArray jsonArray = (JSONArray)jsonObject; 
if (jsonArray != null) { 
   int len = jsonArray.length();
   for (int i=0;i<len;i++){ 
    list.add(jsonArray.get(i).toString());
   } 
} 

Definitely the easiest way to do that is using Gson's default parsing function fromJson().

There is an implementation of this function suitable for when you need to deserialize into any ParameterizedType (e.g., any List), which is fromJson(JsonElement json, Type typeOfT).

In your case, you just need to get the Type of a List<String> and then parse the JSON array into that Type, like this:

import java.lang.reflect.Type;
import com.google.gson.reflect.TypeToken;

JsonElement yourJson = mapping.get("servers");
Type listType = new TypeToken<List<String>>() {}.getType();

List<String> yourList = new Gson().fromJson(yourJson, listType);

In your case yourJson is a JsonElement, but it could also be a String, any Reader or a JsonReader.

You may want to take a look at Gson API documentation.

You have to create another class say Output as

import java.util.List;

public class Output {
    public List<Token> getTokens() {
        return tokens;
    }

    public void setTokens(List<Token> tokens) {
        this.tokens = tokens;
    }

    private List<Token> tokens;
}

and then use

Output output = new Gson().fromJson(json, Output.class);

then you can use output to get list of tokens and go further for suggestion etc

You can use the below methods to read from a file and convert the JSON array to a List of Questions.

public String readJsonFromFile(String filePath) throws IOException, ParseException {
    String json = Files.readString(Paths.get("file path"));
    return new JSONParser().parse(json).toString();
}


public List<Question> convert(String JsonString) throws JsonMappingException, JsonProcessingException {
        ObjectMapper om = new ObjectMapper();
        CollectionType typeReference =
                TypeFactory.defaultInstance().constructCollectionType(List.class, Question.class);
        List<Question> questions =  om.readValue(JsonString, typeReference);
        return questions;
    }

If your JSON keys and Java class fields are different, use @JsonPropery annotation to map keys to fields

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonProperty;

public class Question {
    

    @JsonProperty("question")
    private String title;
    @JsonProperty("answer 1")
    private String a1;
    @JsonProperty("answer 2")
    private String a2;
    @JsonProperty("answer 3")
    private String a3;
    @JsonProperty("correct answer")
    private String cA;

    //setters & getters
}

Required Jars:
jackson-annotations.jar
jackson-core.jar
jackson-databind.jar
json-simple.jar //used to parse Json file to String