COMPARING THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF PANDEMIC AND PRE-PANDEMIC HIGHER EDUCATION LEARNERS IN AN AD-HOC GRAMMAR COURSE

This study intended to compare the academic achievements of two samples of pre-pandemic and pandemic groups within the context of an ad-hoc grammar programme, English Competency Course (ECC), administered at a university in Lima, Peru in 2018 and 2020. The thesis for this study sustained that the students who took part in ECC during the Covid-19 cohort of 2020 – delivered online – performed much better in terms of academic achievement than the ones who took the same course in 2018 in non-pandemic times. The data was treated through the non-parametric Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon U test resulting in better performance for the pandemic group than for the pre-pandemic one. However, it was found that the former sample showed some degree of asymmetry, which questioned the conclusiveness of the test. This fact led to applying the bootstrap resampling method executing 10,000 Mood's median tests; the result was a 98.9% of significant p-values in favour of the pandemic sample. Consequently, it is claimed that on statistical grounds, the 2020 pandemic subjects proved to have attained a better academic achievement in English language learning than the 2018 pre-pandemic ones. In the light of the above results, some recommendations to obtain more valid results concerning the peripheral conditions in which university students learn the English language under online scenarios are provided.