COVID‐19‐Related Changes Impair Student Performance in a Subset of Students

Selsby, Joshua; Bundy, Jennifer

COVID‐19 forced radical changes to the delivery of college curricula world‐wide during the spring of 2020 with little to no warning. Commonly, classes that had been delivered face to face were moved to a virtual delivery format; a practice that continued during the fall 2020 semester. The purpose of this investigation was to perform an interim analysis of COVID‐related changes on student performance. We hypothesized that despite adequate preparation time for conversion to online delivery and a student body comprised largely of digital natives, the collective challenges associated with COVID‐19 would negatively impact student performance. To address this hypothesis we compared midterm data from fall 2020 to a comparison population comprised of midterm data pooled from the 2015‐2019 fall semesters from a large, public, Midwest university. Midterms are assigned as letter grades to students receiving a C‐ or below in a class. Letter grades were tallied for each term and then converted to a numerical score using a five‐point scale (C‐ = 1, F = 5) and summed across all midterm grades within a term to allow quantitation and statistical comparison. We discovered that the percent of students with a midterm (