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Scott Jaschik writes at Inside Higher Education that although most faculty members would deny that physical appearance is a legitimate criterion in grading, a study finds that among similarly qualified female students, those who are physically attractive earn better grades than less attractive female students. For male students, there is no significant relationship between attractiveness and grades. The results hold true whether the faculty member is a man or a woman.
The researchers obtained student identification photographs for students at Metropolitan State University of Denver and had the attractiveness rated, on a scale of 1-10, of all the students. Then they examined 168,092 course grades awarded to the students, using factors such as ACT scores to control for student academic ability. For female students, an increase of one standard deviation in attractiveness was associated with a 0.024 increase in grade (on a 4.0 scale).
The results mirror a similar study that found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely to go on to earn a four-year college degree. Hernández-Julián says that he found the results of the Metro State study “troubling” and says that there are two possible explanations: “Is it that professors invest more time and energy into the better-looking students, helping them learn more and earn the higher grades? Or do professors simply reward the appearance with higher grades given identical performance? The likely answer, given our growing understanding of the prevalence of implicit biases, is that professors make small adjustments on both of these margins."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @04:45PM
2.4% of one letter grade, not of the entire scale, which would be 1/4 of that.
So, 0.06% increase grade per Z-score attractiveness. That is tiny. Indeed, why not talk about the the Z-score change in grades per Z-score of attractiveness? Because it would be apparent that this effect is so small it wouldn't be detected without 15,000 samples!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @04:48PM
So in stead of a 95% on a test they get a 97.4?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @05:38PM
no , 95% to 95.24%
math much?
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday January 07 2016, @05:47PM
No, a typical 4-point grading scale might look like:
percent -> grade
[90-100] -> 4.0 / A
[80-90) -> 3.0 / B
[70-80) -> 2.0 / C
[60-70) -> 1.0 / D
[0-60) -> 0.0 / F
In this case, one point represents 10%, so 0.024 of a point is 0.24%.
(At my university, each professor chose their own mapping of scores to grades, but the structure shown was near-universal -- different professors might choose a difference between grades of 8%, 12%, or 15%, rather than 10%, but always equal steps starting from 100%.)
So instead of a 95%, they might get 95.24% -- or if the test is not graded with such granularity, maybe they'll go from 95% to 96%, one out of 4 times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07 2016, @06:50PM
I'm pretty sure that the only way this is significant is thru excessive statistical power.