Impact analysis of COVID-19 pandemic on students' online exams based on topic model

Abstract

To deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, schools at all levels insist on "classes suspended but learning continues" and actively implement online teaching. Different from the planned shift from offline to online education, COVID-19 caused online teaching to be highly sudden and emergent, producing different learning outcomes from offline teaching. Therefore, it is critical to analyze the epidemic's impact on students' learning outcomes. However, prior studies only focus on statistical data of the learning process, such as students' test scores or homework completion, rather than comments posted on social media. This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on students' online exams by identifying potential topics during the final exam period. We first collect and preprocess a huge number of Weibo posts with natural language processing methods. Then, we explore related topics via LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) model. Finally, the extensive experimental results demonstrate that our findings for the 16 topic groups have significant roles in exploring students' attitudes towards online exams and exam cheating. Furthermore, we found that the overall affective attitudes of users' postings tended to be negative.