How Does the Student's Performance Change Post Covid-19? A College Sample Analysis

Switching from face-to-face teaching to distance one as a measurement of Covid-19 has brought many concerns about learning loss and vulnerable students. We use students' GPA data before and after the Covid-19 outbreaks to investigate the GPA distributional differences due to Covid-19. Our data consists of 537 students from the school of law at Sultan Qaboos University SQU in two semesters; Fall 2019 and Fall 2020. We examine the performance differences from several perspectives; gender, time spent in college, time to graduate, location, and others. Our findings confirm the conventional conclusion that female students outperform their male counterparts. However, we find that the Covid-19 pandemic has narrowed the gender gap in favor of males. The study reveals that male students with low and high performance are the ones that led to narrowing the gap between male and female students.