Education in the Time of COVID-19: The Improvised Experiment of Virtual Assessments

Abstract

One of the aspects in which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the most was education. Teachers and students had to face a new reality for which they were not prepared adapting in an improvised way new methods and strategies to teach and to learn. Within virtual education, exams reduced in some cases to multiple choice tests while others tried to mimic traditional (pen and paper) exams. In this paper, these two kind of evaluations are compared. Although the results appear to be similar, a deeper look shows that their structure is completely different and some groups of students are unfairly harmed or benefited depending on the assessment applied. Beyond analyzing the reasons of this discrepancy, it is determined that for some type of evaluation, at least 21.1% of students maybe passing a course irregularly meanwhile, at least 5.5% could be failing a course despite their actual capabilities.