  This study explores the effects of COVID-19 confinement in the students
performance in higher education. Using a field experiment of 458 students from
three different subjects in Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain), we study
the differences in assessments by dividing students into two groups. The first
group (control) corresponds to academic years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019. The
second group (experimental) corresponds to students from 2019/2020, which is
the group of students that interrupted their face-to-face activities because of
the confinement. The results show that there is a significant positive effect
of the COVID-19 confinement on students performance. This effect is also
significative in activities that did not change their format when performed
after the confinement. We find that this effect is significative both in
subjects that increased the number of assessment activities and subjects that
did not change the workload of students. Additionally, an analysis of students
learning strategies before confinement shows that students did not study in a
continuous basis. Based on these results, we conclude that COVID-19 confinement
changed students learning strategies to a more continuous habit, improving
their efficiency. For these reasons, better scores in students assessment are
expected due to COVID-19 confinement that can be explained by an improvement in
their learning performance.
