Anxiety - Related Factors among High School Students Preparing for University Admission during COVID-19 Pandemic in Thailand

In every student's life, preparing for university admission is considered to be one of the highest priorities. Thai University Center Admission System (TCAS) offers 3 routes (or rounds) for students to enter universities which is called TCAS round1, round 2 and round 3. "This study sought to explore anxiety levels and anxiety - related factors during the COVID-19 pandemic amongst high school students who aim to further study at a university level. We sampled Thai high school students by cluster sampling method. Students responded to a Google form questionnaire that had 3 sections: 1. Personal information 2. Anxiety - related questions 3. The 7 - item Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7). The results show that 302 out of 315 participants, which is 95.87%, agree that COVID-19 affects their university preparation. The average GAD-7 score of those 302 participants is 9.189. Gender also contributes to the difference in anxiety scores. Women tend to have a higher average anxiety score than men. In addition, the study reveals positive correlations between anxiety - related factors and GAD-7 scores. Furthermore, these factors are found to be positively related to each other. Regarding TCAS, since each round has a clearly contrasting method of entry to the universities, the average anxiety scores of each method also differed. Unexpectedly, the average GAD-7 score of students in TCAS round 1 is higher than that of TCAS round 3. While the number of competitors in TCAS round 1 is a lot less than that of TCAS round 3, the ratio between successful applicants and total applicants is a lot higher. This clearly shows that the anxiety level is more affected by the competitive rate compared to the number of competitors.