The Impact of COVID-19 on Students' Marks: A Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Due to COVID-19, universities across Canada were forced to undergo a transition from classroom-based face-to-face learning and invigilated assessments to online-based learning and non-invigilated assessments. This study attempts to empirically measure the impact of COVID-19 on students’ marks from eleven science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses using a Bayesian linear mixed effects model fitted to longitudinal data. The Bayesian linear mixed effects model is designed for this application which allows student-specific error variances to vary. The novel Bayesian missing value imputation method is flexible which seamlessly generates missing values given complete data. We observed an increase in overall average marks for the courses requiring lower-level cognitive skills according to Bloom’s Taxonomy and a decrease in marks for the courses requiring higher-level cognitive skills, where larger changes in marks were observed for the underachieving students. About half of the disengaged students who did not participate in any course assessments after the transition to online delivery were in special support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.063 | 0.126 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".