Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

Mistletoe

I wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?

aurareturn

One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.

crims0n

> When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.

lapcat

I wouldn't place much stock in small studies like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

mikert89

People underestimate how specific the genetic pools are that relate to high intelligence

PeterStuer

An alternative story could be that the women’s presented appearance online may have changed more than men’s and that real appearance changes could weaken the correlation between the paper’s stored photo-based beauty score and what instructors actually saw live. Maybe woman changed grooming effort more than men, or the effects of fashion trends that explicitly drove the woman towards less attractive styles etc. if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.

shevy-java

Can confirm! In the past they would stare in pure awe at my guaranteed impeccable looks. Now they ask me damned question to calculate the speed of fluids in different pipes through the Bernoulli's principle. And ChatGPT only helps so much here ... Also, I think there must be a pretty big difference between female and male, because even if a male student is attract, if I am a male teacher and interested in females, would I wish to prioritize on looks, if the underlying grading is instead done on e. g. testing knowledge and skills? Why would looks even factor in here? Such a system would be flawed from the get go.

kxrm

My first job during and out of college back in 2003, we were entirely remote. We hired exclusively over the phone which resulted in a mix of people that were completely diverse in their backgrounds and at the same time truly qualified to do the work. The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back in. Based on my experience though, if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

SkyeCA

Attraction matters and it matters a lot. This isn't news, a lot of people just don't like to acknowledge it.

TrackerFF

People that have used to be fat, and then lost a lot of weight, will know how brutally different people will treat you. Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you. Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bias against fat people, against "unattractive" people, etc. This also shows in the classroom, work, etc. Of course, actually being conventionally attractive will come with its own perks. People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.

bjourne

I remember this study! It caused huge controversy in Sweden. The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public. It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)

creantum

Once it’s all AI learning we’ll be set.

olalonde

I remember in college there were always small groups of students chatting with professors after class or going to office hours. Many profs would drop pretty big hints about upcoming exams. I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation". Always felt a bit unfair to me.

jeremie_strand

Anonymizing grading wherever posible seems like the obvious policy response here. The fact that many universities still haven't standardized blind grading for written work — even after decades of evidence on evaluator bias — says a lot about institutional inertia.

johnbarron

When you complain about having to interact with AI when applying for a job, remember that AI could be the most fair and unbiased recruiter...as long as companies want to...

alpha_squared

A couple things here: 1. This should have a 2022 tag 2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.

pm90

Our society has a lot of pretty privilege (and tall privilege for male identifying humans). Taking steps to address this is welcome.

vunderba

I'm rather surprised not to see a single mention of the Halo effect in the article or ensuing comments. This is a relatively well-known phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

analog8374

I was attractive and had a horrible personality (college sperg). Long flowing hair, rakish funk, striking. Like bees to honey.

cladopa

As an attractive person myself that studied engineering in several countries of Europe and some years in the US I don't believe there are many opportunities for you to take advantage of your attractiveness. Most examinations were in written form. I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people. Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody. I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social. In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love. Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.