Prevalence of Academic Procrastination and Its Negative Impact on Students

Background: Procrastination is the negative behavior defined as the failure to initiate or complete a task in a given amount of time. This behavior has been observed in students, adults, children of all ages and leads to Engaging in procrastination in an academic setting brings negative outcomes such as stress, guilt, poor academic performance, and low self-esteem and it is important to recognize and fix as early as possible so as to protect their future careers. Academic procrastination is the act of intentionally delaying work that must be completed. Multiple studies have been conducted over decades to understand the reasons why a student procrastinates and how to curb this negative habit. Academic procrastination is task-dependent and that people exhibit procrastination in a variety of behaviors and settings. Purpose of this study was to analyze the prevalence of procrastination among medical undergraduate students in four domains - studying for examinations, keeping up with reading assignments, academic administrative tasks, and attendance tasks. Method: A questionnaire was distributed to the students aimed to analyze the reasons for procrastination and its negative impact on the student's life. Results: Results of this study showed that students nearly always procrastinated on tasks such as studying for examinations and keeping up with assignments, but there was a drop in the degree of procrastination when it comes to administrative tasks. Reasons for procrastination in our study included fear of failure, lack of motivation, poor time management, and social anxiety. If a task is considered uninteresting and boring, it leads to a lack of motivation for the student to get started and the reasons for which are fear of failure, feelings of inadequacy, and peer pressure. Strict measures must be taken to motivate the student against procrastination, such as proper discipline, gratification strategies, time management techniques, assertiveness training, setting realistic expectations and goals, and working on teaching the student to introspect and find the true reason for their task aversion and fixing it. Conclusion: Research such as our study is essential to understand the pattern of procrastination among students, especially students who are in the line of work that directly impacts hundreds of people such as medicine. This negative behavior can directly impact the future career of not only the student but also affect patient care and outcome. As the present data were based on the convenient sampling drawn from the university students; the accuracy of this study can be further refined with further standard and systematic approach by fact-checking the grade point average (GPA) scores and data research with larger and more demographically diverse populations would strength the findings of the study.