Student engagement and performance in online assessments: evidence of ceiling effects and implications for adaptive assessment design

A study by Frontiers in Education identified a significant ceiling effect in online assessments among female computer science undergraduates at King Khalid University, where a majority achieved perfect scores. This effect obscured the relationship between engagement and performance when using traditional statistical methods. However, cluster analysis revealed four distinct engagement-performance profiles, suggesting that despite high scores, varied underlying engagement levels exist.

Why it matters

The presence of ceiling effects in online assessments can lead to inaccurate evaluations of student performance and engagement, making it difficult to identify at-risk students or tailor interventions effectively. Addressing this issue is critical for developing more robust and diagnostically useful assessment tools that provide a clearer picture of learning outcomes and engagement dynamics.

Key insights

• Online assessments exhibit ceiling effects, with over half of students achieving perfect scores, making it difficult to differentiate performance.
• Traditional correlation, regression, and classification analyses failed to show a significant relationship between behavioral engagement and performance due to score compression.
• Cluster analysis, which is less dependent on score variance, identified four distinct engagement-performance profiles.
• One identified profile included students with high effort but low performance, which was not apparent with traditional analysis.
• The study involved 242 female undergraduate computer science students at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia.

Source

Frontiers in Education — https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2026.1879870