Document is current

Article History

Received: 12 May 2025

Accepted: 12 March 2026

First Online: 14 March 2026

Declarations

:

: The studies involving humans were approved by the Ethics Committee of University Putra Malaysia UPM (JKEUPM) (REFERENCE NO: JKEUPM-2024-439). The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements.

: No third-party materials are used in this paper.

: Participants in this study were Chinese upper secondary school graduates from the 2024 cohort of university entry, as they are more likely to pursue higher education. As they are upper secondary school graduates and on the cusp of university admission, their age is 18 + years. Prior to data collection, verbal informed consent was obtained from each participant between November 15, 2024, and January 15, 2025, in compliance with institutional and national legislation. Participants were made fully aware that their student identity numbers will be used to correlate secondary data, such as SES and university admission results, with their questionnaire answers. They received guarantees that this data would be used only for research, kept completely private, and published in an aggregated and anonymized way.

: All authors consented and agreed to publish this paper in Discover Education and Open access publication mode. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

: The authors declare no competing interests.