Abstract:

With the occurrence of first confirmed COVID19 cases in Austria in March 2020, online teaching was introduced at Austrian universities. Not only lectures, but also examinations in the summer term 2020 were held remotely (vice-president’s office University of Vienna, 2020). The current paper examines how students’ academic achievements developed in the terms affected by the COVID19-crisis. Not only the pandemic situation, but also the switch from physical presence to distance learning has significant effects on influences on students’ academic achievements, e.g., social networks, mental load and necessities of online teaching. Whereas academic achievements can be defined in various ways (e.g. grades, duration of the studies, achieving competence,…) this paper measures students’ academic achievements based on the grades of the course or examination.

The learning environment, especially peer groups, is an important influence on students’ learning achievements (Wang et al. 1990), with peer-effects being able to positively influence academic achievements (Boud et al. 1999). Similarly, the social network of students in a course influences learning success (Helm 2017). Beattie and Thiele (2016) even enlarge the concept of social capital to “academic social capital”, considering relationships of students to students and to faculty members. Those relationships can positively influence students’ academic achievements (Chambliss and Takacs 2014). Missing interactions of students and teachers through online learning in the period of the COVID19-pandemic led to a lack of motivation among Austrian students (Schober et al. 2020).

Psychological distress can negatively influence academic achievements (Hofmann 2010). Whereas stress, anxiety and other psychological burdens were widespread among students even before the crisis (Hofmann et al. 2017), the situation worsened in the first months of the pandemic as psychological distress increased among younger age groups (Salari et al. 2020, Braun et al. 2020). Additionally, due to the fast adaptation of onsite concepts and lectures to the online teaching mode, it cannot be expected that all students fulfill the requirements of successful online teaching, e.g. motivation among the students as well as good self-efficacy and time management (Nebel 2017, Yilmaz 2017).

The department of student administration and data management of the University of Vienna was able to provide results of examinations conducted by ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Schaffhauser-Linzatti in the period of winter term 2013 to winter term 2020 (until mid of January 2021). This results in 5,658 exam results of a total of 4,940 students which can be analyzed (42% male, 58% female, average 27 years old).

The analysis was conducted as:
(1) robust binary logit model, using the binary variable success as dependent variable (exam passed or failed)
(2) robust generalized ordinal logit model, using the grades as dependent variable (grades from 1 = A to 5 = F).

The first results of the model indicate that the probability of passing an exam increased significantly during the terms affected by the COVID19-pandemic compared to the period before, with other significant influences such as the age and type of studies considered.

Keywords:

Academic achievement, COVID19-impact, distance learning, online teaching, grades.