VICINITY CONDITION OF ONLINE EXAMINATION: DOES IT AFFECT THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES OF PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENTS?

Abstract

Physical attendance of students in a hall for examinations is no longer being practiced during the global pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Most universities, including Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA) have adapted to online exams. This paper presents an analysis of online final examination performances of 251 students from the Science and Medicine Foundation Centre, UniSZA who completed foundation for 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 sessions. The objective of this research is to compare the final scores of Semester 2 for the students from both sessions to see if there is a significant difference between the two, based on subjects of Mathematics II, Physics II, Chemistry II, Biology II and Information Technology II. Students were taking online exams at home and university’s accommodation for the students from the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 session intakes, respectively. The statistical analysis was performed by comparing two means to attain standard deviation via the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The P-value for each test is calculated to lead to rejection of null hypothesis, which is less than 0.05. The results revealed that the p-value for all subjects is less than 0.001, implying that the probability value for all subjects is less than the significance level at 0.05, which is 1.6449. As a result, the null hypothesis is rejected for all five subjects, supporting the research hypothesis. It was concluded that the performances of the students from the 2019/2020 session obtained a higher score than the performances of the students from the 2020/2021 session.