The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic dramatically changed daily activities globally. In the field of higher education, many universities had to carry out their functions in virtual mode. The National Polytechnic School is an Ecuadorian university, the study modality of which stayed face-to-face in more than 150 years of history. However, since the pandemic, said university had to adapt all its classes to the virtual modality. In this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of academic

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... nce between students who entered to the university leveling course during the pandemic and those who did so before the pandemic. To do this, we analyzed the information of 9,267 students who entered the institution for the first time between 2017 and 2020. We carried out a Variance Analysis the factor of which was the study modality, and then we carried out a Tukey post hoc test to identify homogeneous groups. The results showed that the students who entered the leveling course in virtual mode presented an academic performance significantly higher than the historical academic performance of the students who had face-to-face classes. Nevertheless, results do not necessarily indicate that the students of that period and modality have obtained more knowledge. These findings coincide with some authors who establish that the academic performance of university students is not a reference for cognitive evaluation in all its magnitude, since this process causes the labeling of them, the subjects, and the teachers themselves, placing them in a range evaluation that can determine the capacity, effectiveness, and quality of the teaching-learning process.