Study on the Influencing Factors of Undergraduates’ Willingness to Take Postgraduate Entrance Examination in Application-Oriented University

Rong Chen

Department of Physics, Nanchang Normal University, Nanchang, China.

DOI: 10.4236/oalib.1106744                

Abstract

Objective: To understand the undergraduates’ willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination in application-oriented university. This paper analyzes the influence of “postgraduate entrance examination craze” on students’ willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination, and analyzes its influencing factors, so as to provide reference for formulating the policy of postgraduate entrance examination and the goal of personnel training. Methods: The purpose of this study was to investigate undergraduates’ willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination by self-designed questionnaire. SPSS was used to test the reliability of the questionnaire, and the value of Cronbach’s alpha is 0.838, which meets the reliability requirements to find out the influencing factors of the willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination, and to build a model of predicting the willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination by using multiple linear regression. Results: More than half of the students are willing to take postgraduate entrance examination, and most of the influencing factors have positive correlation and significance with the willingness to take postgraduate entrance examinations. Among them, learning ability, perseverance attitude, teacher encouragement, family support attitude, understanding of postgraduate entrance examination, experience exchange meeting can only explain 33.9% of the total variation of the willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination. Conclusions: It has become a trend for students to take the postgraduate entrance examination. The influence of the “craze for postgraduate entrance examination” on students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination cannot be ignored. Students who want to take the postgraduate entrance examination need to pay more attention to the information about taking the postgraduate entrance examination. Families should increase their support for students, universities and society should actively guide students to establish their own concept of postgraduate entrance examination and treat them rationally.

Keywords

Willingness to Take Postgraduate Entrance Examination, Influencing Factors, Undergraduates, Application-Oriented Universities

1. Research Background

With the popularization of higher education, the popularity of undergraduate education leads to great employment pressure, Severe Employment Situation, and fierce competition for high-educated and high-quality talents. According to the data (data from the website http://www.chinakaoyan.com/info/article/id/77817.shtml), the number of postgraduate candidates rose from 1.77 million to 3.41 million, an average annual increase of more than 17.85 percent from 2016 to 2020, as shown in Table 1.

On February 28, 2020, China’s Ministry of Education said it would expand the enrollment of postgraduate students this year, with an increase of 189,000 people over the same period last year. In 2020, the number of postgraduate candidates will reach 3.41 million, an increase of 510,000 over the previous year. In 2019, about 805,000 people were admitted to the postgraduate entrance examination. According to the enrollment expansion of 189,000 people, the enrollment expansion proportion will be about 23.5%. Similar to the increasing trend of examinees, the number of college graduates in 2020 will increase by 400,000 over the previous year, reaching 8.74 million. Under the dual factors of employment

Table 1. Application for master’s degree candidates in recent five years.

pressure and talent demand, postgraduate entrance examination has become an important way for college students to realize their individual social value. Therefore, it is necessary to grasp the key factors of the postgraduate entrance examination willingness under the new situation and rationally analyze the willingness and influencing factors. This can not only truly understand the students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination, but also help students to establish a correct view of the postgraduate entrance examination, correct their mentality, and find out the comprehensive influence of various factors on the willingness to take postgraduate entrance examination, so as to provide a scientific basis for universities to formulate a reasonable talent training program.

2. Research Problem

1) The correlation analysis between the influencing factors and the willingness of taking the postgraduate entrance examination.

2) Analysis of the influence of various factors on the willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination.

3. Research Object

This study takes Nanchang normal university students as the research object, collects data in the form of questionnaire which is self-designed on the basis of consulting a large number of literatures and sends out the questionnaire through questionnaire star. A total of 372 questionnaires were filled in, 372 were valid, and the effective rate was 100%. The survey objects are freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors of Nanchang Normal University. The ratio of male to female is approximately 4:6, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Basic information of respondents.

4. Reliability Analysis

As can be seen from Table 3, the value of Cronbach alpha is 0.838 > 0.8, the reliability of the whole scale is good, that is to say, the reliability of the questionnaire is good. The CRONBACH’s Alpha values for each item in Table 4 are greater than 0.8, indicating that each item has good reliability.

Table 3. Reliability statistics.

Table 4. Reliability statistics of items.

5. Validity Analysis

Factor analysis was used to test the structural validity of the questionnaire for 26 questions. The test results of kmo and Bartlett are shown in Table 5. Kmo = 0.807 > 0.8 is very good; P = 0.000 < 0.05, which conforms to the sphericity test, and is suitable for factor analysis.

6. Exploring Factor Analysis (EFA)

From Table 6, it can be found that eight principal components can be extracted according to the eigenvalue greater than 1. The cumulative explained variation of the eight extracted factors is 61.448%, and the ninth characteristic root decreases relatively quickly. Therefore, it can be considered that it is reasonable to retain eight factors. The questionnaire has good reliability and validity through the above analysis, and the test data can be used in this study.

7. Regression Analysis

Before making linear regression, the regression variables were analyzed for correlation among variables. Table 7 shows that there is correlation between variables at 0.01 level (bilateral), and there is significant correlation between variables.

Table 8 is the summary of the model, R is the multiple correlation coefficient, and R = 0.582; R² is the determination coefficient, which is used to reflect the explanatory degree of the model, R² = 0.339, which means that the six factors can only explain 33.9% of the variation of the intention to take the postgraduate entrance examination, or 33.9% variance of Y can be captured by these independent variables, In other words, the accuracy of model is only 33.9%. Table 9 shows the statistical test results of the model, using the analysis of variance, F = 31.226, P = 0.000 < 0.05, so the regression model is statistically significant [1] [2] [3] [4].

Table 10 is the coefficient of the constructed model, and the model equation can be obtained as follows:

$\hat{Y}=-0.864+0.216\times X_1+0.163\times X_2+0.282\times X_3+0.279\times X_4+0.212\times X_5$

Among them, X₁ is learning ability, X₂ is perseverance, X₃ is Teacher’s encouragement, X₄ is Family support, X₅ is Understanding of postgraduate entrance examination and $\hat{Y}$ is the predicted willingness of the postgraduate entrance examination.

Table 5. The test of kmo and Bartlett.

Table 6. Total variance explained.

Extraction method: principal component analysis.

Table 7. Correlation among regression variables.

**There was significant correlation at the level of 0.01 (bilateral), i.e., **p < 0.01.

Table 8. Model summary.

^aPredictive variables: (constant), Exchange of experience in postgraduate entrance examination, perseverance, Family support, Understanding of postgraduate entrance examination, Teacher’s encouragement and learning ability.

Table 9. Anova^b.

^aPredictive variables: (constant), Exchange of experience in postgraduate entrance examination, perseverance, Family support, Understanding of postgraduate entrance examination, Teacher’s encouragement and learning ability; ^bDependent variable: Willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination.

Table 10. Coefficients^a.

^aDependent variable: Willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination.

8. Conclusion

There are differences in students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination when they are encouraged by teachers, and there are differences in students’ learning ability. At the level of students, we should strengthen their own perseverance and persistence; at the family level, we should strengthen the support for students; at the school level, we should provide more information about postgraduate entrance examination for students’ reference. In this way, students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination can be strengthened, and the success rate of postgraduate entrance examination can be improved. Application oriented universities focus on training students to become engineers and cultivate their craftsmanship spirit; after this survey, in fact, application-oriented university students also have a very strong demand for postgraduate entrance examination. This article urges the application-oriented universities to improve the corresponding policies and formulate corresponding incentive measures for postgraduate entrance examination.

Acknowledgements

The project was funded by Jiangxi Provincial Department of education (Grant No. GJJ191124). Project supported by Training program for college students in Jiangxi Province (Grant No. S202014437003) and also by the research on teaching reform of Nanchang Normal University (Grant No. JGKT-19-12), to understand and master the students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination, support for designing the app of students’ willingness to take the postgraduate entrance examination and provide a theoretical basis for promoting the construction of study style.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

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