The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educational institutions in Bangladesh to adopt online technology for higher education in just a couple of months, which otherwise would have taken years. This change creates a unique opportunity to examine student performance in online education. In addition to examining the effect of online education on student performance, this paper investigates if there is a systematic difference in grading. Transcript-level academic records of Business and Economics students from one of the leading private universities in Bangladesh for pre-pandemic and pandemic periods have been used in this paper. The multilevel nested panel structure of the data allows the elimination of individual, time, course, and instructor-level fixed effects that may bias the findings of the study.  The results show that student-level grade points in online format are higher by about 0.208 (on a scale of 0 to 4) compared to student-level grade points in face-to-face format. This increase in grade points in the online format is driven by poorly performing students. Course level estimates show that the average grade points (AGP) increase by about 0.086 in the online format, which comes from a narrower distribution, indicating a systematic difference in grading in the online format.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.57138/RWXH4322

Date of Publication 

May 2024

Keywords

COVID-19, Education, Online Education, Student Performance, Cheating, Bangladesh

JEL Classification Code

A20, I21, I23

Recommended Citation

Haque, N., Basher, S. A., & Haque, A. K. E. (2024). Do students perform better in online delivery of education? Evidence from Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Development Studies, 45(1&2), 55-85. https://doi.org/10.57138/RWXH4322