COVID-19 Impact: A Case Study at the School of Agricultural Engineering and Environment of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia

To study the first impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the results obtained by students belonging to the School of Agricultural Engineering and Environment at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), the average of the marks corresponding to three academic years (2016-2019) was compared to those obtained in 2019-2020 for a total of four bachelor's degrees and two semesters. Our results suggest a positive effect on the marks obtained during the activation of emergency remote teaching during the spring semester of 2019-2020 in three out of the four degrees, with these differences being significant for the whole study. Moreover, just at the end of that period, instructors and students were surveyed regarding teaching methodologies, evaluation modalities, and difficulties found throughout the process of adapting to distance teaching. Our results allow us to sensibly think about that exceptional situation in order to propose a set of counterweighting measures which could improve the implementation of distance learning in engineering colleges.