2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a significant impact on society and the academic field. Many colleges and universities faced an enrollment drop during the pandemic years from the Spring of 2020. According to the Research Center's Stay Informed report series, institutions have had a total two-year enrollment drop of 4.2 percent since 2020. The Computer Systems Technology (CST) Department at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) of the City University of New York (CUNY) experienced a similar drop. At the same time, in the Spring 2020, most universities and colleges moved their teaching online. The decrease in enrollment numbers and shift to online teaching, combined with multiple reports of cheating in the wake of COVID-19, present an interesting case for studying the students' performance at different phases of COVID-19. The City Tech is a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), and many of our students come from low-income households and underrepresented communities which were dramatically affected by the pandemic. For the CST Department, the portions of students with economic disadvantages from the total enrolled numbers are around 72.5% in Fall 2019 and around 64% in Fall 2020. This project investigates how the changes in the learning environment (i.e., in-person to virtual and virtual to in-person) affected different student groups at City Tech at various phases of the pandemic. Our work concentrates on the students who take courses in the CST department. The analysis is performed by aggregating multiple institutional and departmental data sets from Spring 2019 to Spring 2022. The student's performance is examined for the sequence of the first three programming courses at the CST Department. It is analyzed along several dimensions, including major, gender, ethnicity, etc., throughout the different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This project investigates the performance of the students who take the CST courses as mandatory courses for the three CST majors as well as the performance of the students (non-CST majors) who take the CST courses as a general education computing requirement. The presented findings show the trends in courses enrollment, passing, failing, and withdrawing from the courses. In addition to a core three-course sequence, the project examines the general department retention numbers.