Consequences of distance learning : Effects of the Corona pandemic on students’ grades

Sammanfattning: The Corona pandemic and Covid-19 has affected the entire globe where we had to adapt to a new way of living and a new standard of doing things. For the universities in Sweden and around the world this generally meant that the universities had to switch to online teaching and digital examinations to the largest extent possible. Even though we have lived in this new kind of every day we know barely anything about how this has affected the grades of the students, and what we can learn about it to do things more effectively in the future. In this paper, I examine the possible effects on grades for students at the university level by using newly collected data from Linnaeus University’s department of economics and statistics. Results show that the grades after the decision to switch to online teaching and digital exams in March of 2020, overall became higher for both males and females but no significant difference between the genders were found.