Introduction: Online assessment is an educational alternative in this health emergency generated by COVID-19. To meet the educational demands of the School of Medicine of the UNAM, we implemented the evaluation of their subjects of the Medical Bachelor online, avoiding the delay of the school career of their students. Methods: A quantitative analysis was conducted to evaluate the academic performance of students enrolled in the first and second year of the degree of Medical Bachelor, being the school years with the highest percentage of failure. Two cohorts of students (2019 vs 2020) in the first and second year of the degree (4,737 students) were analyzed. We compared their school performance in the exams taken in those years (2019 on School premises and 2020 online due to the COVID-19 pandemic) to observe if there was a significant difference through statistical tests according to the distribution of the cohorts. Results: A significant difference was obtained in subjects of both school years according to their school performance. Besides, the percentage of the passing of the 16 subjects in their two evaluations was evaluated, observing that the students of the year 2020 had a higher rate of passing compared to the year 2019, even in those subjects with a higher percentage of failing. Discussion: Our study allowed us to compare the academic performance of our students in two types of examinations, in the School of Medicine and online (because of COVID-19), a situation that will enable us to assess the advantages of this adaptation and a new form of evaluation as a result of the health emergency.

The coronavirus 19 pandemic affected virtually all activities worldwide. One of them was education, especially Health Sciences. Globally, many medical schools ceased their face-to-face activities and implemented institutional reorganization actions. According to their characteristics and possibilities, institutions adopted diverse strategies and tools to continue providing their services online during this health crisis. These situations implied huge challenges, especially for certain regions, such as Latin America.This article exposes a quick overview of the pandemic experience at the biggest Mexican Med School (UNAM Med School): forecasting, reorganization, actions, challenges, and learnings. Among the most challenging situations experienced were: effective communication strategies; resistance to migrate from face-to-face activities to distance activities; technological development; students and teachers training to implement work and study in virtual spaces; students digital gap; internet and computers access; construction and application of online evaluations; online evaluation of practical skills, and the impossibility of maintaining students in clinical clerkships given the pandemic hazardousness. UNAM Med School was not only reorganized to provide integral care to its community, but it also participated in tasks for the health benefit of Mexico as well as for other countries. We had a huge amount of work, reorganization efforts and creativity resulting in very helpful innovations and new projects. This health crisis showed the best of our community. Actions will remain along the pandemic period and a progressive reincorporation to in-place activities at the end of the health crisis. Some strategies such as virtual activities within teaching, learning, work, evaluation and research will be maintained.

Author Revision Notes As per the reviewer's comments, we added more references to strengthen social accountability inclusion; we restructured an article's section, as suggested by one of the authors, by adding a table that would facilitate a better understanding of the implemented strategies. We proofread again intentionally for abbreviations and non-academic terms to meet formality standards and include small changes in the key messages. We thank the reviewers for their feedback. We have also added additional text to the Acknowledgements section and we have made a slight adjustment to the article title.