On Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m., an ECON 103: Macroeconomic Principles lecture is held in Foellinger Auditorium, a lecture hall that can seat over 1,300 people. Despite the large seating capacity, one may be lucky to find more than 80 students attending the lecture, even though the class has 500 students registered.
A 2021 study published in “Medical Science Educator” found that only 53% and 63% of second- and first-year students, respectively, attended non-mandatory lectures after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the era of personal technology, students are substituting lectures for online asynchronous courses. In Fall 2022, 54% of students were enrolled in a completely online course.
Currently, the University offers almost 2,000 online courses. Some involve standard math, while others aim to teach students about the lives of service animals. A variety of courses are available, but students often utilize online classes to complete prerequisite courses or general education credits.
One common course in this realm is STAT 100: Statistics. This class fulfills the quantitative reasoning requirement that all students must complete at the University. V.N. Vimal Rao is one of the course professors. He teaches an in-person lecture of 400 students and an online section.
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“We only began regularly offering an online section of Stat 100 in Fall 2024,” Rao said. “And in the two semesters we’ve had it thus far, the online section has filled much faster than the in-person section.”
Rao also said that students in the online section do “much worse” on exams as opposed to their in-person counterparts. A 2017 study by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities found that taking an online course decreases the potential of earning an “A” by 12.2% and a “B” by 13.5%.
So, if students consistently do worse online, why is there still a preference from University students for online courses? There may be two explanations for this massive shift.
A 2023 study by the Pew Research Center found that 26% of students aged 13-17 use some form of artificial intelligence to complete their assignments. Since online classes allow complete autonomy in most cases to do work, this may mean that students use AI on assignments instead of learning the material.
Anastasia Doris, a sophomore in LAS, commented on her personal experience with the increase in AI-assisted homework.
“It (Chat GPT) can be really helpful, especially for paper structures,” Doris said. “But sometimes I think it can be misused, especially when you are using it to do the work that is supposed to be helping you learn about your major.”
In some cases, this abuse of AI may not stop at assignments. Rao’s STAT 100 exams were online last semester, but in a recent email to his students, he stated that he would be moving the exams to the Computer-Based Testing Facility, an in-person test-taking center.
“A student has posted on Reddit bragging about cheating on a STAT 100 exam,” Rao said in his email. “Therefore, I am making a change to Midterm 3, it must be taken in the CBTF. There will be no ProctorU option.”
According to the Universityʼs Student Code, the student who cheated on this exam violated academic integrity, and their actions could lead to a written academic violation. The issue is that it’s virtually impossible to enforce this rule without the use of expensive monitoring tools like ProctorU.
ProctorU is an online exam monitoring system, but it can also be finicky and wrongly flag students for cheating in some cases and miss cheating in other cases, like the one Rao mentioned.
Another reason for the lack of in-person lecture participation could be chalked up to the decline in lecture etiquette. Anika Brahmbhatt, a sophomore in Business, reported a decline in the lecture experience due to disruptions in her BADM 310: Management and Organizational Behavior class.
“About every 20 minutes she (Professor Judith White) has to pause and ask students to stop talking over her,” Brahmbhatt said. “It takes a lot of time out of class and is really distracting, especially the ones that aren’t even talking about the class subject.”
Brahmbhatt noted that she sometimes considers skipping lectures because of the constant disruptions during class.
With class registration in full swing for Fall 2025, some students may be considering these factors. This may lead to a further decline in in-person lectures and enrollment in these courses. For any student considering taking an online course, Rao has some final advice to give on the subject.
“Taking an online class is like going to a museum but not joining the guided tour,” Rao said. “If you’re thinking of taking an online class, do you have the discipline and motivation to go above and beyond the surface-level information you see in order to uncover on your own all those pieces of deeper information and insights the tour guide would have shared had you joined the tour?”
