ArticleJournal of public economics2022
COVID-19, college academic performance, and the flexible grading policy: A longitudinal analysis.
Article in Journal of public economics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Educational disparities in STEM during COVID-induced distance learning and a potential strategy to address them.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mental Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on College Students: A Literature Review with Emphasis on Vulnerable and Minority Populations.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- A dashboard for the evaluation of the effect of school closures on wellbeing of children and parents.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2023Article
- Unraveling the controversial effect of Covid-19 on college students' performance.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Triple Jeopardy of Minority Status, Social Stressors, and Health Disparities on Academic Performance of College Students.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- The effect of lockdown on students' performance: A comparative study between Italy, Sweden and Turkey.Heliyon · 2023Article
- The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Quality Education of the Medical Young Generation.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- The relationship between tolerance for uncertainty and academic adjustment: the mediating role of students' psychological flexibility during COVID-19.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The Relationship Between On-Site Clinical Practice, Nursing Professional Value, and Nursing Clinical Self-Efficacy During COVID-19: A Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2023Article
- Can peer mentoring improve online teaching effectiveness? An RCT during the COVID-19 pandemic.Labour economics · 2022Article
- Hitting where it hurts most: COVID-19 and low-income urban college students.Economics of education review · 2022Article
- Child development and distance learning in the age of COVID-19.Review of economics of the household · 2022Article
- What is behind the gender gap in economics distance education: Age, work-life balance and COVID-19.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
I use an unbalanced panel of over 11,000 academic records spanning from Spring 2017 to Spring 2020 to identify the difference in effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across lower- and higher-income students' academic performance. Using difference-in-differences models and event study analyses with individual fixed effects, I find a differential effect by students' pre-COVID-19 academic performance. Lower-income students in the bottom quartile of the Fall 2019 cumulative GPA distribution outperformed their higher-income peers with a 9% higher Spring 2020 GPA. This differential is fully explained by students' use of the flexible grading policy with lower-income ones being 35% more likely to exercise the pass/fail option than their counterparts. While no such GPA advantage is observed among top-performing lower-income students, in the absence of the flexible grading policy these students would have seen their GPA decrease by 5% relative to their counterfactual pre-pandemic mean. I find suggestive evidence that this lower performance may be driven by lower-income top-performing students experiencing greater challenges with online learning. These students also reported a higher use of incompletes than their higher-income peers and being more concerned about maintaining (merit-based) financial aid.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.