Factors Affecting Students To Change Their Intentional Colleges And Majors For Postgraduate Entrance Examination

The enrollment of graduate students in colleges is related to the quality of the source of students and the quality of graduate education.Students have formed a fixed thinking of choosing colleges and often change their intentional colleges and majors for postgraduate entrance examination.Exploring the reasons why students change their intentional colleges and majors has an important role in attracting high-quality students.The author selected 88 postgraduates and undergraduates admitted to the postgraduate course in the software college of a certain university to investigate the reasons why they changed their intentional colleges and majors for postgraduate entrance examination.The questionnaire included the basic information of students,their intentions for postgraduate entrance examinations,their changes in the intentional colleges and majors for postgraduate entrance examination and their overall undergraduate performance.The author conducted one-on-one interviews to investigate the experience of students changing their intentional colleges and majors and used grounded theory to analyze the influencing factors.There were 30 initial categories refined in the open coding.In the axial coding stage,6 main categories and11 subcategories were sorted out.In the selective coding stage,there was a core category called "the factors affecting students to change their intentional colleges and majors for postgraduate entrance exam".Then the author constructed a theoretical model and explained the model in conjunction with the relevant principles of educational ecology and calculated the importance of each influencing factors in the model.First of all,the time that students change their intention is concentrated in the second semester of the junior year,the summer vacation of the junior year,and the time before the forecast,and most of them change their intentional colleges.Secondly,There are 5 factors that affect students to change their intentional colleges and majors,which are pursuing success in postgraduate entrance examinations,self-efficacy,development space,external circumstances,and information usefulness.These factors are embedded in the educational ecosystem.The pursuit of success and self-efficacy are located in the micro system,which is the most direct factor that affects students to change their intention.The development space and the external situation are in the meso system,which influences students to change their intention by conducting college evaluation and self-assessment.Information usefulness is located in the macro system,providing information support for students to self-assess and make a decision.Besides,the results showed that the importance of the factors in the model is ranked as development space,external context,information usefulness,self-efficacy,and the pursuit of success.And the importance of factors differs among the four types of students,which are students who re-entry for graduate entrance examination,on-the-job students,students admitted to their undergraduate school,and students admitted to other schools.Finally,the author putted forward corresponding suggestions for colleges to attract high-quality students,including innovating enrollment propaganda methods,improving the strength of institutions and reforming the admission mechanism.