Narrowing awarding gaps: the contributory role of policy and assessment type

Awarding gaps between various groups of students persist across the Higher Education sector, yet the responses designed to address the contributors remain localised. The sudden spread of COVID-19 led to various responses across the University sector creating an unprecedented natural experiment and offering the opportunity to compare outcomes from these measures with prior cohorts. This study seeks to investigate the effects of two COVID-19 interventions on students’ performance in the Business and Management discipline at a UK university. The specific COVID-19 measures considered here are the move to online assessments and the new grade policy to ensure the pandemic did not affect students’ outcomes adversely. We use a Kernel Propensity Score and a Quantile Difference in Differences models to estimate the treatment effect of the two COVID interventions on the treated group, namely term two students’ performances of the academic year 2019/20. Our results indicate that the effects of both COVID interventions supported the outcomes of international students, thereby narrowing the awarding gap. Findings suggest firstly that institutional policies adopted in crises should seek to address potential adverse effects on student outcomes for the period of disruption, indicating that significant care should be taken in their drafting. The policy, in this case, was found to have achieved its aim. Secondly, the move to new modes of assessment combined with detailed briefings from faculty may have served to uncover aspects of the hidden curriculum for this group, contributing to a narrowing of awarding gaps between different groups of students.