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Abstract
We compare student performance before and during the Covid-19 pandemic using three course outcome measures: grades, scores on standardized course-specific assessment tests, and the incidence of dropping, withdrawing, or earning a grade of F. Across 10,000 observations and all business disciplines, grades trended higher throughout pandemic, although student performance on assessment tests and the incidence of failing or dropping remained unchanged. This suggests that universities and employers who use GPA as a screening tool should be cautious. First-year and first-generation students did significantly worse in online courses when compared to courses with some in-person element, suggesting that universities and instructors may need to devote academic support resources to these subgroups.
Notes
1 After the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, universities around the world began to close to face-to-face learnings. This was quickly followed by stay-at-home orders designed to slow the spread of Covid-19, the potentially fatal disease associated with the novel coronavirus. Although re-openings began in mid-May in the United States, nearly every college and university finished the semester fully online.
2 We exclude Professional Business Skills, which focuses on subjects such as resume writing, interviewing, and company research. We also exclude Quantitative Business Analysis, an Excel skills course. Both courses are atypical in content and delivery.
3 The university enrolls roughly 11,000 undergraduates across four colleges: business, letters and science, education, and nursing. Pre-business students are those who are not yet admitted to the college of business and are taking business pre-core courses and intend to major in business.
4 In North America, the semesters prior to the closure correspond to Spring and Fall 2019, Spring 2020 was the the first pandemic semester and complete closure and Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 correspond to the semesters after the closure. Spring semesters run from February to May and fall semesters run from September to December.
5 At our institution, HyFlex was designed so that students could choose to attend in person or online, or to switch between the two. Lectures were livestreamed and instructors had the choice to record these or not. However, all assessments had to take place online. Courses that required some degree of in-person attendance could require assessments be taken in the classroom.
6 Fifteen instructors taught in either four or all five of the semesters under consideration; they accounted for the vast majority of sections offered. Faculty new to the university or those who retired, were on sabbatical or were on administrative leave taught in fewer semesters.
7 An adjunct faculty is one who teaches on a short-term contract, often one semester or one year, and is not eligible for tenure.
8 Over the period of consideration, changes were made to the Essentials of Financial Accounting, the Essentials of Managerial Accounting, the Essentials of IS, and the Essentials of Organizational Behavior assessments. We include dummy variables for changes and the timing of changes in the empirical analysis where necessary.
9 Assessments were given in Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Economics and Business Statistics, Essentials of Finance, Essentials of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Essentials of Marketing, Essentials of IS, Essentials of Organizational Behavior, and Essentials of Human Resource Management. Assessments were not given in Essentials of Managerial Accounting in the Spring and Fall of 2020, Essentials of Financial Accounting in the Spring 2020, and Essentials of IS in the Spring of 2020.
10 Essentials of Financial Accounting, Essentials of Managerial Accounting and Essentials of Organizational Behavior changed the assessment tests in the Fall of 2020. Essentials of IS changed the assessment test in the Spring of 2020.
11 While a handful of nonbusiness students may enroll in some of the courses we consider, most of the students in our sample are pre-business and business majors. That means that any individual student would likely be enrolled in several courses at the same time (an enrollment).
12 For example, if Instructional Academic Staff teach larger classes or courses that students have to retake more often, then they will see more students and their proportion relative to other faculty will be higher when weighted by student and course. We calculate averages by student and course to stay consistent with the results found in the regression analysis.
13 As noted previously, many students appear in our sample multiple times because they took multiple courses. Since we are interested in determinants of student success across courses and across semesters, we retain these multiple observations as they represent unique course enrollments. However, we weight the observations by the inverse of the number of times and individual is in the regression and cluster the errors by student to avoid problems of interdependence of errors. We have chosen not to employ a fixed-effects strategy to correct for the repeated observation of the some of the students in our sample because the strategy causes us to lose the ability to investigate many of the variables of interest (e.g., gender, race).
14 Course-specific dummies are suppressed to save space in all relevant regressions.
15 In the unaffected semesters, first-year students earned 0.094 of a grade-point higher than second year students (SE = 0.054). In semester affected by the closure, these students now earned 0.071 of a grade-point less (0.094–0.071 = 0.023); the result was not statistically significant. In the two post-closure semesters, these students earned 0.094–0.125 = -0.031 (SE = 0.041), or 0.031 of a grade-point less; this difference was statistically significant
16 Failing to take the assessment was also associated with an increase in a students’ grade. We speculate that in sections where the assessment was given as extra credit, students who had already achieved a sufficiently high grade had little incentive to invest the time to complete the assessment.