Contributing Factor of Procrastination and Academic Consequences Among Students In

UITM Puncak Perdana.

According to (Ferrari, 1995) the term of procrastinate originated from Latin verb of
“Procrastinare”, which means to delay something until tomorrow. In the other hand (Dryden,
2000) stated that procrastination involves the delay in work, initiating and completing a task until
the last minute, until the time that has been given and reach the deadline or indefinitely.
(Tuckman, Abry & Smith, 2002) has proposed academic procrastination as an avoidance
behavior which could result negative effect to students.

Today, procrastination has become a common issue among student that affects their
student life. This refer to (Okaiye, 2011) who reported that academic procrastination and poor
study habit put students at academic risk. In addition, he also added that academic
procrastination damages the academic performance and contributes to other issues such as lack
of commitment, poor time management skills, social problem, over confidence, emotional stress
and illness.

In addition, Steel (2008) pointed out that procrastination effects the self-efficacy and self-
actualization, distractibility, impulsiveness, self-control and organizational behavior of the
students. It makes students lazy and passive developing delaying tendency in them; either they
feel hesitation in taking initiatives or fear to start a work or an assignment. Furthermore, different
researchers have found several problems associated with academic procrastination, for example,
low achievement of students and their increased physical and psychological problems (Ferrari &
Pychyl (2008), anxiety (Lay, 1995; Onwuegbuzie 2004), irregularity, confusion and
irresponsibility (Rivait 2007).

However, some psychologists such Brasini, 2008 and Sears, 2008, in their perspective
said that procrastination may have positive consequences as people delay task to spend their time
doing other useful alternative activities. This case defined as “productive procrastination”. Both
researchers think that procrastinate may be a good decision because even the person decide not
to do an initially planned task immediately, they may use their time to do another job they can
perform better. Thus, in our opinion, if student procrastinate a task it could be a good decision if
he feel the task was less important than expected (i.e. less rewarded and satisfying) or the person
overestimated his probability of success (he accomplished the task but with a failure, so he did
not get any reward). In this case it is better to delay the task and spend the time in other
activities.

This also been supported by other researchers who feel that procrastination does not
necessarily have a negative impact. For example, Tice and Baumeister (1997) reported that
compared with nonprocrastinators, procrastinators experience less stress and have better physical
health when deadlines are far off. In this sense, procrastination can be seen as a strategy that they
use to regulate negative emotions, thereby making the individual feel better, at least temporarily.
Moreover, whether a person does a task far ahead of a deadline or only slightly ahead of it does
not necessarily affect the quality of the work. Along the same line, Knaus (2000) agreed that
delaying can be beneficial as when people start to work at the last minute, they can still finish on
time and that they tend to work better and faster or generate more creative ideas under time
pressure.
As the conclusion, the present study focused on analyzing the factor of procrastination that
affects the learning process among student in UiTM. Besides that, we also want to analyze either
procrastination effect on student academic performance in term of submission of their
assignment and report with time that has been given while preparing for the examination and
their achievement.