Abstract:
Provision of internet access facilities has very important role in enhancing the academic
performance of the undergraduates in the universities. This study explored the access of
internet and its impact on the academic performance of undergraduates in University of
Vavuniya. A questionnaire was used to gather data from 158 first- year, second- year and
third, and fourth year students in the faculty of business studies through random sampling
during the period of June, 2025. The collected data were analyzed using frequency statistics,
and ordered probit regression model. Among the students, 70.3% of them are females and
rest of the 29.7% of them are males and they spent 4.8 hours per day to access the internet.
Results of frequency for GPA revealed that, 44.3% of the students got the GPA between
2.01 to 3.00 while only 26.6%of them got the GPA range between 3.31 to 4.00. Out of four
types of online tools, 65.8% of them used all four tools such as Google, LMS, You Tube,
Zoom and only 5.7% of them used zoom to access the internet. The students are facing
various challenges to access the internet and out of them, 46.8% of them told as internet
speed is very slow and 17.1% of them told as internet connection is not stable, 16.5% and
14.6% of them told as they spent higher cost for data card and difficult to learn by internet
access respectively. In order to identify the impact of internet access on academic
performance of undergraduate students, ordered probit model was applied in the study. Its
results revealed that, types of internet connection which represents the usage of both mobile
data and Wifi, issues of internet connection significantly influencing the academic
performance of the students. Findings of this study will be very helpful for undergraduate
student to recognize the impact of internet access and its usage on the academic achievement
and performance.
