ACADEMIC PROCRASTINATION AND PERFECTIONISM

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This focus of this dissertation is to determine the relationship between academic procrastination and perfectionism amongst university students in Mauritius. The study therefore addressed some factors that are believed to affect university students in their life as a student and play an important role on the level of academic achievement.

This chapter will serve its introductory purpose by defining the key terms (subsection 1) that will be used throughout this dissertation so as to have a clearer insight of the subject going to be dealt with. It also gives a description of the problem statement (subsection 2) of the research, describes the aims and objectives of the dissertation (subsection 3) before finally giving a general overview of the dissertation (subsection 4).

Defining the key terms

Procrastination is the act of putting off, deferring, prolonging, delaying, stalling or even postponing a task for a future period in time (Rosário et al., 2019). The tasks that people actually tend to put off are often ones which are considered of high priority in a person’s agenda. A person can be said to be procrastinating when that individual begins to substitute tasks of higher importance with others that are actually of lower priority or are of no particular importance. Procrastination is a word that generally has a pejorative connotation and it is usually considered as an undesirable act. Indeed, one of the most famous quotes on the undesirability of the act of procrastinating, reprised by even the former president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson, 2015), comes from the Earl of Chesterfield in his letter to his son: