Individuals sometimes purposefully engage in strategies that reduces their chances of success, and they attribute the reason for their failure to these. For instance, students procrastinate until the final hours before an exam, and sometimes do not put the complete effort even though they are able to do so. In other words, they self-handicapp. Often strategies like these are employed when people want to avoid the pain of failure, or don't want their abilities to be questioned by others. Even though excuses are made and pain is avoided through these, negative outcomes including anxiety, low self-esteem, and perfectionism can happen as a result of self-handicapping as well.
As a period filled with assignments and exams, it is college years that these strategies, academic self-handicapping in this context, come to the fore. However, there is a lack of body of knowledge on why and how these manifest during this period remains less investigated compared to academic self-handicapping during k-12 education. Thus, to fill this gap, this ongoing study aims to investigate academic self-handicapping strategies of university students. It employs a qualitative phenomenological design. Data will be collected through semi-structured interviews from 20 university students. The results will shed light on students' behaviors, thoughts and emotions regarding their academic life, as well as when and how they do academic self-handicapping. It is expected that conclusions of this research will also help college counselors in designing interventions to help students overcome these destructive strategies, improving their academic well-being.