Introduction:

The lockdown derived from the health situation at the end of the first quarter of 2020 in Spain forced the second part of the 2019-2020 academic course of all educational levels to be move to the online modality in a compulsory and unforeseen way.

Objective:

To identify the impact of online teaching on the academic performance of medical students in the 2019-2020 academic year.

Methods:

The study was cross-sectional and used anonymized public data on the academic performance of medical students in Spanish universities. Based on public information from the internal quality assurance systems of these universities, the mean values of performance and success rates were analyzed for the four academic years between 2015 and 2019 in seventeen Spanish universities. Using a Student's t test, these were compared with those obtained in the 2019-2020 academic year.

Results:

The performance and success rates were higher in the 2019-2020 academic year compared to the average of the four previous academic years.

Conclusions:

The situation of lockdown and forced change to online teaching seems to have produced an improvement in the already high academic performance of medical students, being this suggestive of high levels of resilience and a good capacity to adapt to an adverse situation such as the one experienced in the second part of the 2019-2020 academic year.

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