Student perceptions, academic performance, and COVID-19: evidence from Brazil’s national assessment in accounting

The Covid—19 pandemic intensified concerns about the effectiveness of institutional adaptations in maintaining educational quality. While prior research has documented declines in academic performance, less is known about how multiple layers of the educational ecosystem jointly shape these outcomes. This study applies Ecological Systems Theory to examine how pandemic—related disruptions influenced accounting students' academic performance in Brazil, considering the microsystem (individual conditions), mesosystem (institutional support and teaching practices), exosystem (institutional conditions), macrosystem (structural conditions), and chronosystem (the pandemic as a historical event). Using microdata from the 2022 National Student Performance Exam (Enade), the analysis covers 33,507 accounting students across 1,109 programs, employing descriptive, inferential, and regression techniques. Academic performance is associated with conditions across ecological levels, some general and others specific to the pandemic. Family income emerges as the strongest predictor, whereas institutional support, perceptions of remote teaching quality, and structural characteristics show weaker associations. These findings provide evidence that effective operational responses do not necessarily guarantee the preservation of educational outcomes during a systemic crisis, and that persistent inequalities reinforce disparities. Equity—oriented support should prioritize core accounting competencies, particularly specialized technical knowledge and written argumentation, which showed the lowest performance, thereby strengthening educational resilience.