Did Covid-19 restrictions in higher education affect students’ performances? Evidence from an Italian university

The 2020 year has been characterized by an unprecedented epidemic that has involved all countries in the world. The Covid-19 emergency is having a strong impact on all aspects of everyday life, including services to education. The shift to emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 has had a strong impact on training procedures, with the consequent readjustment both in methods of teaching and in learning approaches. A natural research question concerns the impact on students’ performance, as measured by exam scores, of the face-to-face teaching suspension. In order to understand the effects of the sudden transition to emergency remote teaching, in the present work a through comparison has been carried out between the outcomes of the exams taken by all students of a medium-sized University in Italy before and after the occurrence of Covid-19 pandemic. Results may be helpful in understanding advantages and limitations of distance learning, which seems to have become a new standard in the present and near future.