Analyzing Perceived Academic Stress among First Year Undergraduate Students during Online Distance Learning

Due to the global pandemic, most academic institutions switch their learning activities into an online-based system to keep them safe from the COVID-19 viruses while ensuring students continue their lessons and academic activities. However, experiencing the whole year with online learning might be overwhelming and uncomfortable for first-year undergraduate students. Hence, this might lead them to have mental health consequences, such as stress or fatigue, through the past year doing online learning and also might bring impact on their academic performance. Stress and fatigue levels in students may be high since they had to sit and face monitors every time they joined a lecture with an online learning platform yet the level has not been identified yet. They might experience the symptoms most of the time and every day due to the lecture and group discussion for given projects or assignments. This study aims to measure perceived academic stress levels among first-year undergraduate students in online learning during the pandemic outbreak and how they overcome it. An 18-items questionnaire based on Perceived Academic Stress (PAS) is administered to the first-year undergraduate students of a faculty at Universitas Airlangga on a 5-point Likert scale. We tested the level of academic stress from those selected instruments to measure their academic stress over the past year. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. We used Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis method to investigated the difference in PAS scores between male and female students and among study programs in the faculty, respectively. The result of this study shows that data science technology students perceived significantly difference perceived of academic stress level with students from other majors, except electrical engineering. In addition, the result shows no significant difference perceived of academic stress between males and females. Further studies are necessary to conduct how mental health and stress would affect their academic performance, and how to reduce the risk.