The Academic Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the 2019-2020 United States Freshman Classes as Measured by SAT Performance

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had lasting impacts on the world. The impacts range from economic to educational and personal. There has been a large focus on the educational impact that students have experienced due to the pandemic. This impact stems from the lockdown and school closures that occurred during the pandemic, which resulted in students in the US losing three to four months of in-person traditional instruction. Unfortunately, many studies around academic losses due to the COVID-19 lockdown have been focused on primary school level students, meaning that little has been published about the lockdowns’ impact on secondary level students. The author sought an answer to the question, has student performance overall been statistically impacted at the secondary level of education due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown? The answer was determined through box plot analyses of 2017-2022 SAT datasets which showed that there was some negative impact to student performance overall from the COVID-19 lockdown that had resulted in students losing three to four months of in-person instruction, even with other forms of instruction being offered where available. However, the drop in performance was reassuringly not found statistically significant as determined by a Z-Test that was performed on the overall country average performance values.