Exploring the Impact of Covid-19 on academic motivation and perceived stress among undergraduate students’ in Malaysia

This study aimed to examine the relationship between academic achievement and perceived stress amongst undergraduate students during Covid-19 pandemic. Two variables were involved namely academic achievement and perceived stress. This study involved descriptive and inferential statistics analysis. The study samples involved final year students in a Malaysian public university from 5 different programs of studies. 150 respondents were chosen based on a simple random technique from 250 population amongst undergraduate students. The students are identified as respondents that stay in campus for a period of 3 months during Movement Control Order (MCO). Questionnaires of Academic Motivation Scale (AMS-C28) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) by Vallerand (1992) were used with Cronbach alpha 0.85. The results showed that both genders affected the high level of academic motivation and low level of perceived stress. While based on genders there was no significant difference between academic motivation and perceived stress during movement control order amongst the students. The relationship between academic motivation and perception was also no significantly correlated during faced with these situations. In further research, researchers suggested to obtain a larger sample and involving diversity of programs from Faculties to gain a robust data and this may contribute to a better finding in the future.