In the Spring of 2020, many universities moved all of the courses online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study was designed to determine if student goal orientations would influence how they responded to the shutdown of their university. Specifically, we were interested in whether the types of academic goals students set might influence the amount of effort they put into their courses following the move to an all online format. We surveyed more than six hundred undergraduates at a large state university regarding their effort and expected grades following the shutdown as well as having them complete a self-report questionnaire designed to measure their goal orientations. Results suggest that students who set task-oriented goals were most resilient to the impact of the pandemic shutdown of the university.