Abstract

The transition from secondary education to university is widely recognised as a critical yet

unevenly supported stage in students’ academic trajectories. In Uzbekistan, many students enter higher education after achieving strong results in an exam-oriented school system, only to encounter unexpected academic and institutional challenges in their first year. This study opens the “black box” of first-year transition in Uzbekistan’s higher education system by examining how early student difficulties emerge not from individual unpreparedness, but from the pedagogical and institutional conditions under which transition unfolds. Drawing on qualitative interviews and reflective student accounts, the findings show that early academic difficulty is a predictable outcome of misalignment between the forms of competence cultivated and rewarded in school and those assumed and recognised at university. Viewed in this light, higher education reforms aimed at modernisation and expansion can be understood as having opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, where institutional repositioning has outpaced attention to the everyday pedagogical work required to support student transition. By foregrounding student experience in an underexplored Central Asian context, this paper contributes to scholarship of teaching and learning debates that position transition as a pedagogical responsibility rather than an individual burden, highlighting the need for more explicit, contextually grounded approaches to first-year transition that resonate beyond Uzbekistan in rapidly reforming higher education systems.