Universities increasingly record lectures and make them available online for students. Though the technology to record these lectures is now solidly implemented and embedded in many institutions, the impact of the usage of recorded lectures on exam performance is not clear. The purpose of the current study is to address the use of recorded lectures in an authentic setting by focusing on the actual time spent on the usage of recorded lectures and the impact on lecture attendance and exam performance. The participants were 396 first‐year university psychology students attending a mandatory course on biological psychology. During the course, student attendance to face‐to‐face lectures was registered and the viewing of the recordings monitored. Results revealed that a large amount of students used the recorded lectures as a substitute for lecture attendance. The group who uses recorded lectures as a supplement when developing a knowledge base score significantly higher on the assessment. When assessing higher order thinking skills, no significant differences were found between using recording lectures and attending lectures. This can be partly explained by relatively low predictive value either form of lectures have on exam performance.