Academic stress has become a persistent concern in higher education because it undermines students' psychological well-being, engagement, and academic performance. Guided by the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, this study examined the types of coping strategies that undergraduate students at a private university in Malaysia use to manage academic stress. The study pursued three objectives: to identify the predominant coping strategies employed by undergraduate students, to examine the interrelationships among problem-focused, emotion-focused, and avoidance coping, and to evaluate the reliability of an adapted coping strategies instrument within the Malaysian higher education context. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was adopted. A total of 100 full-time undergraduate students were recruited through convenience sampling and completed a self-administered online questionnaire adapted from a validated Malaysian coping strategies instrument. Data were analysed using SPSS version 29, involving data screening, descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and Pearson correlation analysis. The findings revealed that problem-focused coping was the most predominant strategy, with 89 percent of respondents agreeing that they develop solutions to manage their problems, followed by benign forms of distraction based coping such as listening to music and resting. The problem-focused and emotion-focused coping scales demonstrated good and acceptable internal consistency respectively, while the avoidance coping scale showed moderate reliability. Problem-focused coping correlated significantly with emotion-focused coping, and emotion-focused coping correlated significantly with avoidance coping, whereas problem-focused and avoidance coping were unrelated. These findings support the transactional view that students combine multiple strategies when responding to academic demands. The study contributes context-specific evidence for designing stress management interventions in Malaysian universities and advances the agenda of Sustainable Development Goal 3 on good health and well-being and Sustainable Development Goal 4 on quality education.
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