2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During the COVID19 pandemic many faculty switched to a completely online mode of teaching and assessment for the 2020-2021 academic year. To prepare for this new mode of assessment, old exams from previous years of teaching became a collection from which to pull problems to create the online exams for the new COVID19 academic year.
In this analysis we compare the results of the online exams (administered during the COVID19 academic year) with the same problems collected from pre-COVID exams. The online Dynamics exams:
• Covered three to four topics per exam (Same as previous semesters)
• Each topic had an option of 2-3 different problems that were randomly assigned to each student
• Each problem had randomized numbers for certain variables within the problem
This made every exam unique from one-another either in terms of problem and or numbers, while covering all the same topics.
This is the beginning of a more detailed comparison of student performance on pre-COVID and during-COVID exam problems. Our prediction is that students will perform worse in the online exams when compared to those same sets of problems that have been worked out on previous exams due to the extra stresses associated with pandemic issues and online courses.
Contrary to our expectations, students showed a marginal improvement in exam performance during the COVID19 pandemic when compared to exam problem performance from pre-COVID exam problems. However, it may be difficult to identify single variables that could have affected performance of students taking exams during the COVID-19 pandemic versus those before the 2020-2021 academic year.