By Cordelia Mosher 26’
Academic performance is the measure of a student’s achievement across various academic subjects. This includes the level of knowledge and skill that a student achieves. Academic performance can be measured by GPAs, college entrance exams, graduation rates, and standardized tests. Research has suggested a correlation between poor academic performance and the COVID-19 pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic students learned and attended their classes virtually. Many people, including ordinary people, are asking if the pandemic affected students’ academic performance and if so, how much?
To begin, we must discuss what factors normally affect academic performance. Some of the main things that negatively impact academic performance are high anxiety, depressive symptoms, excessive internet use, and alcohol consumption, as well as a negative attitude towards school, poor quality sleep, and insufficient studying skills. Keeping these things in mind, we can begin to bring the pandemic into the picture.
Elevated stress levels and anxiety were observed during virtual learning. This was caused by inaccessibility to the internet and schools’ inability to properly adapt to online learning. As discussed above, high anxiety is one of the main factors negatively affecting academic performance. During a study consisting of 341 university students. 250 of these students were women and 91 were men. Students who had already been failing subjects before the pandemic did significantly worse than those who were already passing their classes before the pandemic. In addition, women who had low risk consumption of alcohol and a record of passing classes did better during the pandemic than men with the same situation. These studies have shown that virtual learning led to a negative attitude and low motivation in students—another main factor contributing to poor academic performance—toward school because students prefer face-to-face learning.
Although the evidence suggests that the pandemic has negatively influenced some students, other students excelled during virtual learning. This is due to greater interaction with family, more parental supervision, and a lack of extracurricular activities to interfere with schoolwork. The benefit the pandemic created can also be attributed to how schools handled the pandemic. Institutions that provided students with proper technology and required tools and adapted better to online learning tended to produce students that excelled during the pandemic. Negative factors of the pandemic were made worse for students who did not have an easy life at home and did not have enough financial and material resources. These students were negatively affected by the pandemic, unlike the students who had the correct technology and a steady home life.
It is clear that the pandemic did influence the academic performance of students, whether good or bad. However, this begs the ultimate questions: Are these issues just seeds that the pandemic planted that will blossom into bigger and more pressing problems with time? And are we simply hoping they will disappear as the pandemic finally comes to a close?
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