South African universities have one of the lowest graduation rates in the world, especially amongst first-year university students. South Africa's first-year university students are taxed with tremendous challenges. One of the most important amongst these challenges is considered to be academic motivation, which is strongly related to students' academic success. Despite this, to date, little work has been undertaken to source and validate a reliable instrument to measure students' academic motivation. This article is based on the proposition that there is a pressing need for a valid and reliable instrument that measures academic motivation and its effect on students' academic success. The psychometric properties of the Academic Motivation Scale-College version were examined for first-year university students. The findings are promising for using this scale to measure academic motivation of first-year university students.