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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: 4, Interesting) by danmars on Thursday January 07 2016, @05:45PM
Came here to say "group work" - the summary doesn't say whether this is exclusively including classes with no group work or presentations. It's entirely plausible that attractive female students would have other group members try harder to try to attract attention, or other students who would rate them higher on peer evaluations. This would also explain why the professor's gender is unimportant - the people who matter are the fellow students, not the professors. Group work in online classes doesn't include the in-person interactions which may create that difference between the students, which would explain why they lack the difference.
Also, there's the possibility others have mentioned that the attractive female students are getting more tutoring help from people who are interested in them, but I don't think that explains the online-equality component as well as group work and presentations do.
So, while interesting, it doesn't tell us why the attractiveness may matter. The linked article and summary pin the problem on the teacher, but we don't know that. It could easily be peers influencing the grades.
I'd be curious to know whether the effect exists in classes without any group work or peer evaluations.
(Score: 1) by driverless on Friday January 08 2016, @05:34AM
It could also be something completely different. The OP says that "there are two possible explanations", when there are actually three, with the third one being that they screwed up the methodology, failed to correct for one or more confounding factors, etc etc (an example being the widely-reported "result" that Asian students are being discriminated against for entry into certain colleges because ones who were admitted had higher GPAs than non-Asian students, when they were being scored on a whole range of things, only one of which was the GPA).
I'll wait for a later analysis that shows what they did wrong in this study.