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Academic failure: unspoken experiences by international postgraduate students in a Malaysian university

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posted on 2021-04-12, 00:46 authored by Jasvir Nachatar SinghJasvir Nachatar Singh
© 2020, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR). All rights reserved. Malaysia aspires to become a regional and international hub of higher education through an international student mobility initiative. Existing scholarly work on international students is skewed towards understanding the general challenges faced by international students, but limited work has been conducted in exploring the impact of severe supervision challenges on international postgraduate students’ experiences in a Malaysian research university. Hence, this paper explores the evidence of academic failure experienced by international postgraduate students by drawing on semi-structured interviews with 33 international postgraduate students. Academic failure experiences were faced by international postgraduate students as a result of two major challenges: supervision issues, and faculty mismanagement. The experience of academic failure has impacted the students’ enthusiasm, motivation and inspiration in progressing in their research work and has also impacted them psychologically. The implications for developing significant and profound strategies to assist international postgraduate students in achieving positive educational outcomes are also discussed.

History

Publication Date

2020-11-27

Journal

IAFOR Journal of Education

Volume

8

Issue

4

Pagination

16p. (p. 79-94)

Publisher

International Academic Forum

ISSN

2187-0594

Rights Statement

The Author reserves all moral rights over the deposited text and must be credited if any re-use occurs. Documents deposited in OPAL are the Open Access versions of outputs published elsewhere. Changes resulting from the publishing process may therefore not be reflected in this document. The final published version may be obtained via the publisher’s DOI. Please note that additional copyright and access restrictions may apply to the published version.

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