제 22 호 Student Syndrome
Kicker: LIFE
Student Syndrome
By Ye-Dam Hwang, Reporter
Are you an organized person when you are doing your work? There are maybe some people who starts their tasks with planning, but I guess many people have the experience of having left the work to the last minute and just did it when the deadline came close. Especially for the students like me, I think they may have some experiences of cramming for the exam at least just one time. This tendency of students about putting their work off until the deadline not only happens in Korea, but also in other countries so that we can call this a common thing across the world as “student syndrome”.
The Meaning of Student Syndrome
What is the exact meaning of student syndrome? Student syndrome was first introduced in the “Critical Chain” of Eliyahu M. Goldratt in 1997. It describes students’ planned procrastination until the last moment before the deadline of their assignment or tasks. In the experience of student syndrome, people only start to make notable progress when they are pressed for time and they have to do and finish their work with the sense of urgency. This can remove temporarily the burden of tasks, but ultimately puts people under stress and pressure to do them. According to Steel, Piers, in "The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure"(https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65), an estimated 80 to 95 percent of college students engage in some form of procrastination. Therefore, we can assume that this term of delaying tactics does not only apply to students, but also to many people in various fields globally.
The Reasons Why Student Syndrome Occurs
In spite of the pros such as making the best efficiency and lessening stress temporally, it is certain that the bad sides of this syndrome are bigger than the good sides. Then, why do people put off beginning their assignment or tasks and experience student syndrome? One reason is that many people are likely to procrastinate when they have to do something that they don’t want to do as much. Samuel Johnson, a poet and critic of the United Kingdom, said “‘Postponement’ is, no matter what it is big or small, one of the universal weaknesses that everyone has”. Like his saying, many people usually make a plan to do their assignment based on the deadline and take some time to relax in the initial time. Then, when the relaxing time ends and the time to start to do their tasks comes closer, they work with a sense of hurry that causes the people to put a decent enough amount of effort into their tasks. This poor time management of people can make people to fail to appropriately set priorities of their work and to put effort into them in a timely manner.
The second reason and third one for this can be fear of failure and overload. For many people, failure may be the thing that they don’t want to meet. Therefore, fear of failure can lead people to postpone beginning to work on something, because they don’t want to confront the possibility of not doing well on their tasks. This fear is somewhat critical because it can eventually cause people to establish the concept that they are basically losers. Also, overload or burnout makes people to strive to finish their work and other responsibilities because they may be exhausted or worn out already with other tasks. In addition, due to the nature of assignments in college and some fields where people should make and manage their working plan, people are more likely to delay their work and this is particularly true for the people who use the methods to self-regulate which can be fluid. With many accessible distractors like social media or games, they can easily go off on a tangent and lose focus to complete the task at hand.
Student syndrome which refers to planned dilatoriness is happening universally in many different field and can be caused by poor time management like delaying tendency, being fearful of unsuccess, and overload or burnout. Besides these causes, there can be some other causes or accelerators of student syndrome for each person. Thus, to avoid failure by experiencing this syndrome, I suggest for you to try self-cause-analysis of your delaying habit, and I hope for you to establish a constant studying plan or long-term plan for your assignments or tasks when you have to do them.
Sources:
https://www.koreahealthlog.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=5014
