Improved student performance in cardiovascular physiology despite the pandemic, class size increase and switching to a pass/fail grading system

Abstract

Physiology has been a foundational course in medical curriculums for several decades. At William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine (WCUCOM), Medical Physiology is taught in both semesters of the first‐year curriculum. Cardiovascular physiology is the first major organ system we teach after the foundational lectures and takes up most of the Fall semester. Going from the 2019‐2020 to the 2020‐2021 academic year we faced multiple challenges: 1) the world‐wide COVID pandemic has forced us to switch to a hybrid curriculum, which for the physiology course meant switching from live lectures to lecture recordings with once weekly online Q&A sessions, 2) also due to the pandemic we switched from the A,B,C,F grading system to pass/fail for all courses, 3) we were undergoing the first stage of a planned class size increase from 100 students to 150 students. Any of these factors could have negatively affected student performance. In this study, we compared overall student performance on the traditionally challenging cardiovascular physiology section between the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 student cohorts. In 2019, 105 students completed the Fall semester at WCUCOM. Their average exam score on the cardiovascular questions was 79.91±9.68%, and the average standard deviation between the three exams was 8.59±5.18%. In 2020, 156 students completed the Fall semester at WCUCOM. Their average exam score on the cardiovascular questions was 83.11±9.51%, and the average standard deviation between the three exams was 9.37±5.68%. The increase in the mean exam score between cohorts is statistically significant (P=0.013, Mann‐Whitney rank sum test), while the average standard deviation between exams is not significantly different between the two groups (P=0.397, Mann‐Whitney rank sum test). These findings show that student performance on the cardiovascular section of the Medical Physiology course at WCUCOM improved from the Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 semester. Our results suggest that factors traditionally considered to adversely affect student performance, such as changes in curriculum delivery during the pandemic, changes in the grading system, as well as a significant class size increase, are not necessarily negative influences.