We often encounter procrastination in the academic environment. Procrastination often irritates the assignor and causes remorse for the offender. One of academic tasks which is usually procrastinated is graduating paper/thesis.
Sia Tjun Djing’s observation for five semesters of 1502 graduates at private universities in East Java showed that 938 (59.3%) graduates completed the thesis in the last month of judicium. This issue, said Sia Tjun, can also be found elsewhere, starting from the S-1 to S-3 programs regardless of ethnic and national boundaries. It is a common problem in many leading and non-leading universities. "Procrastination is very detrimental in terms of costs, at the national level, a delay per semester causes additional costs up to trillions of rupiah," Sia Tjun, a faculty member of Faculty of Psychology, University of Surabaya, said on Friday (8/9) in an open examination of Doctoral Program at UGM.
Procrastination often causes guilt, anger, and useless feeling. Procrastination can result in career disruption, role conflict, and problems in social relations. In terms of university, the delay impacts on the buildup of lecturer’s workload. "This problem may also trigger academic dishonesty ranging from ‘thesis-making services’ to the ‘sale and purchase of title’," Sia Tjun said in Auditorium G-100 Faculty of Psychology Universitas Gadjah Mada.
In the dissertation entitled Development of Thesis Procrastination Measurement Tool, Sia Tjun explained that procrastination theory had been studied since the 1980s, but new real comprehensive theoretical framework was only developed in the next two decades by the approach of Temporal Motivation Theory/TMT. This theory believes that procrastination occurs due to the low subjective usefulness when the deadline is still long. "It means working thesis tends to be ignored when the deadline is still long. Students will soon do it when the deadline is approaching. It can be seen from the sudden jump of the number of graduates every time near the judicium. The number dropped dramatically when the deadline passed," the husband of Sandra Mungliandy and the father of Kaizen Bagus Asia, added. He graduated cum laude from UGM Psychology Doctoral Program.