Mashilo M.T, Selelo M.E
COVID-19 pandemic affected higher educational institutions not just in Wuhan, China, where the virus originated but in all other higher educational institutions across the globe. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the quality of education in the selected institution of higher learning. The outbreak of this virus across the globe has compelled the entire country to shut down to monitor the spread of the virus. Thus, the government introduced educational countermeasures to continue educating students despite the COVID-19 dilemma. In that, the theme was “save the academic year and save lives”. Today’s reality is learning across majority if not all institutions of higher learning stepped into the digital world in which students and lectures are virtually connected. Based on the researcher’s experience and observations in academia, online learning is effortless to comprehend as compared to the traditional contact learning. Students take assessments from the comfort of their homes, which permits them access to consult any form of assistance possible and even write in groups discussing the assessment. Without doubt, this instigates questions about the integrity, quality, and credibility of education. This resulted in average pass rate of students skyrocketing. Hence, it created a fallacious impression of the pass rate and intellectual capacity of students. The paper put forward the argument that the shift into online learning as a requirement for new normal have its own negative side in the sense that the quality of education is being compromised. This is supported by the call of accreditation bodies such as South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) which made a call to request some of its programmes to remain venue based to ensure and maintain integrity of the assessments. The paper is desktop study which relied on literature review as part of its methodology. The paper is also grounded on the pragmatic experiences and observations of students and group discussion of prominent people in academia to strengthen its argument. The paper recommends that summative and formative assessments be venue based while observing social distancing and venues be thoroughly prepared for such assessments.