As a current student, I can understand the stress and fatigue that students go through everyday to turn in assignments, study for exams and at the same time maintain a social life. These pressures can be immense on a student and can sometimes lead to negative behaviors as a coping mechanism.
As learned in Chapter 9, some students are capable of self-sabotage when it comes to academics because it’s easier to have a planned reason for failure. Two concepts in particular that strike me personally are procrastination and self-handicapping. Procrastinating is putting off work until the very last moment and is often the result of stress or the lack of motivation to complete a task (Gruman, 2017). I can personally account that these two techniques of student self-sabotage are nothing short of ideal for a stressed student.
Finals time can be a very stressful time for students and last semester I took it especially hard. I was constantly fatigued from taking many 400 level courses in my major. So when finals month rolled around I was extremely excited to get to Winter break and go home and relax for a little bit. I knew I had a bunch of work that needed to be completed prior to leaving, however I let the stress of the semester take over and instead of preparing for finals week. I did the absolute bare minimum work and did not study for a single final more than a week in advance. This was insane for me because I usually block out at least a month to prepare well for finals. The actual finals week rolls around and I procrastinated my work so much that I had to cram study before every one of my finals. I ended up doing well on my finals somehow, but it causes even more stress to procrastinate than if I actually studied in the first place.
Also, the week before finals I knew that I had a 20 page research paper due during finals week, yet I did not want to do poorly on it so I saved it for when I had time to do it perfectly. I would consider my attitude around not completing this paper in time to be self-handicapping because I know that I am a perfectionist when it comes to writing and I would rather have run out of time to complete the paper than to have turned in one that does not reflect my best work.
Reflecting on my experiences from the last finals semester and how poorly my outcome was, I can relate to how procrastination and self-handicapping can negatively impact a students academic performance. Students should be given the proper resources to be able to combat these negative academic strategies in order to boost student self confidence and productivity.
Applied Social Psychology : Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Jamie A. Gruman, Frank W. Schneider, and Larry M. Coutts . SAGE Publications . 2016