Online learning during COVID-19 produced equivalent or better student course performance as compared with pre-pandemicempirical evidence from a school-wide comparative study

Eighty percent. Hold that number for a second. That's the share of dental students who, after a pandemic forced them online against their will, said they wanted to stay there — at least partially. This is not a satisfaction score from a curated e-learning program or a preference survey at a forward-thinking tech school. This comes from students whose campus shut down with almost no warning, whose instructors scrambled to move everything online in a matter of days, and who then said: keep some of this. That number is the first hint that what looked like a disaster might have produced something worth studying. Meixun Zheng, Daniel Bender, and Cindy Lyon at the Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry at the University of the Pacific saw the same thing. In March 2020, when stay-at-home orders closed the campus and pushed all didactic instruction online, they recognized an accidental natural experiment — the kind researchers almost never get to run. They had a real before: the same courses, the same instructors, and the same grading policies taught face-to-face in summer quarter 2019. And now they had an after: those same courses delivered online in summer quarter 2020. That's a quasi-experimental design, meaning they couldn't randomly assign students to conditions, but they could compare real grade distributions across real cohorts. And they did. The study enrolled four hundred eighty-two pre-doctoral students across all three Doctor of Dental Surgery classes and two International Dental Studies classes. Two things were measured. First, a perception survey — an eight-question instrument with a four-point Likert scale, administered in the final week of summer quarter 2020 across nineteen Doctor of Dental Surgery and ten International Dental Studies courses. Three hundred seventy-nine students responded, a seventy-nine percent participation rate. Second, and more importantly, actual grade distributions. After excluding courses that were new in 2020 or had changed their topic sequencing due to a curriculum redesign, seventeen comparable courses remained. For each one, Zheng and colleagues ran chi-square tests comparing how grades were distributed — across the A, B, C, D, and F categories — between the 2020 online cohort and the 2019 face-to-face cohort. No self-report, no estimates. Real grades, statistical comparison. Start with what students thought, because that sets up the performance data in an interesting way. Most courses were well-accepted. Across all three Doctor of Dental Surgery classes, between seventy-eight and eighty-three percent of respondents said they wanted some online instruction to continue after the pandemic — that's where the eighty percent figure comes from. Most courses scored at or above three on the four-point scale on the question "Overall, this online course is effective," indicating general approval. But approval varied. Among first-year Doctor of Dental Surgery students, Anatomy and Histology had only thirty-five point five percent of students agreeing that the online format supported their learning, with a mean of just two point one out of four. Professionalism and Dentistry, by contrast, had ninety-four point three percent agreement and a mean of three point three. So the experience was not uniform. The regression analysis asked what actually predicted whether a student found an online course effective. The independent variable was students' perceived ability to engage with faculty and classmates. The dependent variable was overall perceived course effectiveness. For all nineteen Doctor of Dental Surgery courses, the relationship was statistically significant, with a p-value of essentially zero. The explained variance — the R-squared values — ranged from zero point twenty-six to zero point fifty for first-year courses, zero point thirty-nine to zero point sixty-five for second-year courses, and zero point twenty-two to zero point forty-four for third-year courses. Among International Dental Studies courses, nine out of ten showed the same significant positive relationship, with R-squared values reaching as high as zero point seventy-seven. The one exception was Integrated Clinical Science III, which didn't follow the pattern. The takeaway from the perception data is clear: it wasn't the technology, it wasn't the format, and it wasn't synchronous versus asynchronous delivery that drove whether students found a course effective. It was whether they felt connected to their instructor and their peers. Now the performance data. This is where the study gets genuinely surprising. In sixteen out of seventeen courses, the online 2020 cohort was equally or more likely to earn an A than the face-to-face 2019 cohort. In four of those courses, the online students were actually more likely to earn an A. In twelve, the distributions were statistically equivalent. Only one course went the other way. Take Anatomy and Histology — a course where students reported the lowest satisfaction with the online format. Even there, the online cohort earned seventy-nine A's compared to thirty-six in the prior year, with a chi-square statistic of twenty-seven point thirty-seven and a p-value of essentially zero. Students were less satisfied with the experience and still performed better. The one exception was Integrated Clinical Science II. There, the face-to-face cohort earned thirty-two A's and the online cohort earned only twenty-one, a statistically significant difference with a chi-square of fourteen point twenty-five. Zheng, Bender, and Lyon link this directly to student feedback: in that course, the assessment didn't align well with lecture materials and expectations were unclear. That's not a failure of online delivery in general — it's a design problem in a specific course. Which actually reinforces the broader finding. Now for the honest accounting. This was not a randomized trial. The 2019 and 2020 cohorts were different students, and they faced different circumstances. Students in 2020 were navigating a pandemic — stress, disrupted living situations, uncertainty about their futures. But they also had something their predecessors didn't: reduced clinical training hours due to campus restrictions, which the authors suggest may have freed up more time for didactic study. That's a real confound. Assessment conditions also changed in a meaningful way. In 2019, exams were computer-based in physical classrooms with faculty proctoring. In 2020, students took exams at home, monitored remotely by webcam software. The paper acknowledges that remote proctoring could have increased anxiety for some students. It also flags the possibility that some instructors were more compassionate with grading during the pandemic — more flexible with deadlines, more lenient in borderline cases — which could have shifted grade distributions upward. And because the survey was anonymous, the researchers explicitly state they could not link individual perception scores to individual course grades. The engagement finding and the performance finding are both real, but they come from separate analyses that can't be connected at the individual level. These caveats matter, and the authors don't hide them. But they also don't erase what the data show. A forced, rushed, imperfect transition to online instruction — at a professional school where hands-on training is the whole point — produced grade outcomes that held steady or improved in sixteen out of seventeen courses. And the students, by an eighty percent margin, said they wanted to keep some of it. What Zheng, Bender, and Lyon are pointing toward isn't really a verdict on online learning as a category. It's something more specific and more useful. The factor that predicted whether students found online courses effective was perceived engagement — feeling connected to faculty and peers. That's a design target. It tells you where to invest: not in fancier platforms or more elaborate video production, but in the structures that make interaction feel real. About half of students, incidentally, preferred a combination of synchronous and asynchronous delivery — not purely live and not purely self-paced, but both. That preference maps onto what the engagement data suggest: students want flexibility, but they also want contact. The authors call for future research that links perceived engagement scores to actual course performance at the individual level — something this study's anonymous survey design couldn't do. They also note that the findings may not generalize beyond this single dental school, beyond didactic instruction, or to disciplines that are less exam-driven. Those are real gaps. But here's what the pandemic inadvertently produced: empirical data on a question institutions had been debating theoretically for years. The forced experiment ran. The grades came in. And in a school training dentists — people whose profession is defined by what their hands can do — the part of the curriculum that moved online didn't break. It held, and in most cases it held better than before. This lecture was created by ennepō. 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