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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychiatry

Sec. Anxiety and Stress Disorders

This article is part of the Research TopicArtificial Intelligence in Educational Technology: Innovations, Impacts, and Future DirectionsView all 23 articles

Utilizing Artificial Intelligence to Assess Academic Exam Anxiety, Perceived Stress, and Achievement Motivation among College Students

Provisionally accepted
Zuhal  HamdZuhal Hamd*Zamzam  A MohmedZamzam A MohmedNouf  AlroqaibaNouf AlroqaibaSherine  Mohamed OmarSherine Mohamed OmarHala  ElsayedHala ElsayedMaha  Mahmoud LashinMaha Mahmoud LashinMaha  AlderaMaha AlderaAmal  I AlorainyAmal I Alorainy
  • Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The meaning of exam anxiety is a confluence of physiological manifestations and affective responses that impede one's capacity to achieve academic success. In contrast, Academic stress is defined as students' impression of their stress level due to academic pressure, which includes workloads, deadlines, and self-perceptions. Achievement motivation is the student's capacity to strive for their most significant performance level, called accomplishment motivation. In the presented paper, an evaluation of academic anxiety, perceived stress, and achievement motivation of academic institution students' before and after exams was done by analyzing the results of an online questionnaire. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software was used to analyze questionnaire results. A fuzzy logic system (FLS) is used as a type of artificial intelligence that can applied to Students' psychological state evaluation to determine their academic exam anxiety and achievement motivation to perceived stress. Finally, comparing the results of SPSS and FLS applied, the results indicate that artificial intelligence can efficiently evaluate students' academic exam anxiety. The findings demonstrated that there was a significant interaction between perceived stress and achievement motivation prior to exams (β = 0.02, 95% CI: 0.01 to 0.02, p < 0.001), but no such effect after exams (β = 0.00, 95% CI: -0.01 to 0.01, p = 0.554). This suggests that achievement motivation only acts as a moderator between perceived stress and academic anxiety in the time leading up to the exams.

Keywords: Academic anxiety, achievement motivation, artificial intelligence, fuzzy system, perceived stress

Received: 14 Aug 2025; Accepted: 19 Jan 2026.

Copyright: © 2026 Hamd, Mohmed, Alroqaiba, Omar, Elsayed, Lashin, Aldera and Alorainy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Zuhal Hamd

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