ASSESSING THE ACCEPTANCE OF CHATGPT AMONG HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY IN PAHANG

The current study, which is entitled Evaluating the Assessing the Acceptance of ChatGPT Among Higher Education Students: A Case Study in Pahang, aimed to assess the behavioural intention of university students with regard to using ChatGPT in various academic levels. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) was selected as a cross-sectional survey approach, data were collected from 184 respondents between March and May 2025 through both online and printed questionnaires. The core antecedents included in the analysis were the performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, habit, and personal innovativeness and were operationalised using a five-point Likert scale. Descriptive analysis revealed an overall mean behavioural intention score of 3.523 (SD = 0.901), indicating a generally positive inclination toward ChatGPT adoption. Notably, both bachelor and postgraduate students erred higher mean scores (4.400 and 4.370, respectively) in comparison with students of the foundation level (3.393), which suggests that students of higher learning level assign AI-based technologies a higher academic rating. These results highlight an increasing openness to generative AI among the population of higher education, and at the same time, they indicate the presence of strong inequalities among the academic layers. Therefore, the findings reinforce the need to introduce specific AI-literacy programmes and responsible digital education to facilitate fair and responsible usage. Despite the methodological constraints, such as sampling, and the disproportional number of groups, the generalisability of the findings is diluted but still, the study provides useful information to the growing discourse on AI implementation into higher education, at least in the developing regional milieus. Moreover, the study presents practical research implications to institutions of higher education working to come up with evidence-based, inclusionary, and ethically sustainable strategies to implement ChatGPT and other similar technologies in pedagogical and curricular contexts.