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Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
- creantum 7mo agoOnce it’s all AI learning we’ll be set.
- Mistletoe 7mo agoI wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?
- jdthedisciple 7mo agoPerhaps some other (hidden) premium that only shows in males, like a confidence premium?
- CodeyWhizzBang 7mo agoThe article says: Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.
- cubefox 7mo ago[flagged]
- atwrk 7mo agoAnd have you tried to find out why IQ associations are "taboo" in academia?
- cubefox 7mo agoYes. Have you tried to find out why making certain pieces of scientific knowledge taboo has had very bad consequences in the past?
- atwrk 7mo agoWell I happen to have a phd in that broader domain. It's not censorship, as you imply, but IQ is just way fuzzier a concept than people outside of this area of research think. The popular view is IQ is an objective thing, exactly measurable and so on (the metaphor of brains being computers, essentially). In reality you can put a 14 year old from a bad environment into an optimal environment and their IQ increases by up to 20 points over a view years.
- cubefox 7mo agoIQ is highly heritable, so I don't think there is any environmental factor that has this big an impact, except in extreme cases like severe malnutrition. Also note that IQ increases with age roughly into early adulthood independently of environment, so the IQ of a 14 year old increasing is a perfectly normal part of the heritable parts of development.
- tptacek 7mo agoWhat's "highly"? It's likely somewhere between 15%-50% --- weak-to-medium, if you read it as a correlation coefficient.
- tokai 7mo agoBecause its a small study with a biased population.
- threethirtytwo 7mo agoIt's easy. For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty. They are judged by it and the core of their power stems from it. That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. That is why women "care" about beauty much more than men. They know that beauty = power. Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman. And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else. We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution. Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here. I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too. Edit: I looked it up, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289610001315 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.
- mschuster91 7mo ago> That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships. And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]... > Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28z4zypkno https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28z4zypkno
- aurareturn 7mo agoOne 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.
- StefanBatory 7mo agoAnd a side note from me as a Pole - online I see many Americans speaking about how cruel Gaokao is, but... It's America that's outlier. I had the same style of exam in Poland to get to uni, and it's the same in the entire EU, and rest of the world. So I have no idea why Gaokao is singled out.
- christophilus 7mo agoWe have the SAT and ACT, and those are objective. The wealthy still pass disproportionately due to better tutoring specifically oriented to those tests. It’s Goodhart’s law.
- StefanBatory 7mo agoThat's fair, but... What's the alternative? Obviously someone's going to have better academic performance if you have tutors, there's no way around. Still, if you have good academic performance - you have it. American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic performance at all? Unis should not care about unrelated things)
- keiferski 7mo agoUniversities in the US and other countries are not the same, and comparing them is not really fruitful. US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.
- lapcat 7mo agoI wouldn't place much stock in small studies like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- isaacfrond 7mo agoI wouldn't either. The difference for female and males reeks of the law of small numbers.
- lapcat 7mo agoIt's comment catnip for HN though.
- tgv 7mo agoEven if the data is truly representative and unbiased, we should also not believe conclusions that draw so heavily on interpreting correlation. One could just as well conclude that male intelligence and beauty go hand in hand. Or that men have a better relationship with the teacher. Or that the effect of female beauty fades with distance. Or that COVID had an effect on make-up style. The confounds are endless.
- crims0n 7mo ago> 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.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoWho is your parents play a larger role than attractiveness.
- master-lincoln 7mo agoA larger role for grading University students? Certainly not where I studied in central Europe. In which country do university tutors know the parents of their students?
- bombcar 7mo agoThey're trying to say that if you're born to (successful/married/privileged/whatever you want) parents, that will have more of an effect on your outcomes than your attractiveness. But that's orthogonal to the question. It's probably true that Zuck's kids will do better than mine (though that also depends on how you measure things) but that doesn't change whether they'd do better if they looked better.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoSchool doesn't start at university, and social reproduction is not a myth. Look at the cohorts of top universities/programs.
- shevy-java 7mo agoGood point. Good looking people may have different social skills. Some may have horrible social skills; others may be great. That whole focus on looks is very strange.
- mikert89 7mo agoPeople underestimate how specific the genetic pools are that relate to high intelligence
- eager_learner 7mo agomeaning what exactly ?
- PeterStuer 7mo agoAn 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.
- jdthedisciple 7mo agovery important observation indeed, if that wasn't accounted for it means much less to me
- loremium 7mo agoaren't online curses a lot text only which inherently is harder to communicate
- davidhalter 7mo agoAttractive females might also have different behavior in remote teaching. Attractiveness directly affects how people behave and feel. This might also be different for males vs. females. I'm sure that attractiveness does play a role for grades, it's just not nearly as simple as the paper puts it. There are a lot of potential explanations, which is why these kinds of studies are unfortunately not that helpful and often cause questionable media coverage.
- shevy-java 7mo agoCan 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 7mo agoMy 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.
- speedgoose 7mo agoAudio interviews are currently broken. People can use AI and many will do. Not necessarily for speech generation but to know what to say. For research studies, we slowly revert to on premise physical interviews at work. If we want the ChatGPT answers, we don’t need another human in the loop.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoHR loves video interviews for precisely this reason. They understand their role in the company to use their social expertise to suss out bad vibes, and it turns into something like Mean Girls.
- torginus 7mo agoI think most 'attractive' people put effort into their appearances, which might appeal to management types who evaluate work performance. Also, imo the best way to get a management position in my experience isn't to work hard, or be knowledgeable, but to be the least objectionable pick. This varies with country/company, with Euros usually being appearance focused, but in US companies, it's dudes in crumpled T-shirts all the way to the top (in engineering). Seriously, it's so entertaining to sit in on an important meeting with a US vendor which looks like a college dorm party with an impeccably dressed guy or lady (from sales and/or management) who sticks out like a sore thumb.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoBest way to get a manager position is to be a few inches taller than everybody else. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but pay attention to how often the boss is taller than everybody else on the team. Not always, but far more often than random chance can account for. (Incidentally, the best boss I ever had was barely 5 feet.)
- SkyeCA 7mo agoAttraction matters and it matters a lot. This isn't news, a lot of people just don't like to acknowledge it.
- elevatortrim 7mo agoI think there is an expectation that it should not matter, and there is a reality that it does matter, and there is lots of discussion because the expectations and the reality do not match.
- ecshafer 7mo agoWhy is there an expectation that it should not matter? Is it just childrens shows? In many countries you have to put a headshot on your resume, that seems very overt that attractiveness / looks does matter. In the west there is a large idealism over practicality sometimes.
- TrackerFF 7mo agoPeople 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.
- anon84873628 7mo agoOr as 30 Rock put it, attractive people live in the "bubble". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bubble_(30_Rock) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bubble_(30_Rock)
- Revanche1367 7mo agoI feel this as a guy trying to lose weight very seriously this year. On one hand, I can lose weight but I will forever be short unless a miracle occurs lol. I’ve made my peace with being unattractive for the most part, the attempt to lose weight is primarily for health reasons.
- TrackerFF 7mo agoI went from being a scrawny guy in my teens, to a chubby/fat gamer in my late teens/early 20s, and then a fit athlete in my mid 20s. While I had envisioned much more interest from the ladies, my biggest surprise was how much nicer, kinder, and helpful random people were. And in a professional setting, co-workers and leaders just treated you more seriously - especially when it came to handing out leadership roles on projects etc.
- simonask 7mo agoAlso helps to not be a teenager.
- bjourne 7mo agoI 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. :)
- bombcar 7mo agoWow - this is about the level of a grade-school science project.
- olalonde 7mo agoI 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.
- butILoveLife 7mo agoWhile engineering school was hard, I did think quite a bit of it was pure participation testing. I used to think this was wrong, until I got into engineering.. Sure there is the rare math problem, but most of the difficult part was: "Are you willing to fly to mexico and be awake at 3am when the parts are made?" I might be downplaying though... I did calc 1 at a job.
- kevinsync 7mo agoIt's always said that a lot of success and opportunities are attributed to being in the right place at the right time (aka "luck"), but in a lot of cases, those folks had the tenacity to be in the right place ALL the time; when opportunities arise, they typically go to whoever's present and available. Chatting with professors after class or attending office hours might be a grift, but it's not necessarily unfair. Specific circumstances aside, anybody can do it to get some leverage.
- strathmeyer 7mo ago[dead]
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 7mo agoI don’t think it’s that simple. My assistant professor friends build relationships with students and help them work on topics and weaknesses. They get to know students and how to help them on problem areas. For deeper courses they may help them pick topics to write about and sources to read. Having that context for the ongoing feedback from grading and mentoring is valuable. Depending on the work it simply might not be possible to do anything blind. Even without names, handwriting and writing styles are obvious. Even in an office setting I can always tell who wrote something as small as a sign or a note by handwriting or word choice alone.
- bombcar 7mo agoYes, unless you have the grading done by someone else in some sort of double-blind setup, or replace everything with computer-graded multiple-choice questions, you're still going to be pretty identifiable.
- jimbokun 7mo agoYou would have to separate the teaching and assessment functions entirely.
- sh201 7mo agoThis would only matter if the students were unfairly graded, which the paper didn't demonstrate.
- Jensson 7mo agoOther studies have shown girls gets higher grades than boys for the same essays. We don't know if that is related to attractiveness though, but we do know gender based discrimination do occur.
- jdthedisciple 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- johnbarron 7mo agoWhen 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...
- simonask 7mo agoAI has exactly the biases of its training data.
- alpha_squared 7mo agoA 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.
- nemomarx 7mo agoI was wondering about the year. Are schools still doing online course work and exams now? I would think ai concerns would drive even more in person oral test / notebook testing stuff?
- Insanity 7mo agoOnly recently learned about the 'red pill' thing by watching the 'manosphere' documentary by Louis Theroux. For others unaware how it relates to the above comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere. The documentary was an interesting if somewhat unsettling thing to watch.
- JollySharp0 7mo agoYou gotta be careful about Louis Theroux. I watched one of his old documentaries (late 90s IIRC) about South Africa with a guy who is a Afrikaner that I speak to semi-regularly on the internet. He said that while the people that Louis presented did exist, they were considered loons by the rest of the community. Most of the documentarians from the BBC even some of the better ones like Adam Curtis, tend to distort things. The "Red Pill" thing was stolen by these guys back in ~2018 from smaller political communities online that used it to just mean "I've been sold on an idea" usually people who were agorists / libertarians / ancaps.
- Insanity 7mo agoThanks for the heads up. For the most part he interviews people with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on social media. So not random nobodies, and at least some of the names I’d at least heard of (like the Tate brothers). But as with anything, being a bit skeptic is a good thing.
- analog8374 7mo agoI was attractive and had a horrible personality (college sperg). Long flowing hair, rakish funk, striking. Like bees to honey.
- pm90 7mo agoOur society has a lot of pretty privilege (and tall privilege for male identifying humans). Taking steps to address this is welcome.
- busterarm 7mo agoWhy though? Maybe the advantages are natural and our species is selecting for it.
- simonask 7mo agoBecause we know better.
- busterarm 7mo agoThere's a word for that. Hubris.
- bell-cot 7mo ago"Advantages" are often to the individual's benefit, but the species' detriment.
- busterarm 7mo agoI dunno...Wolves are pretty much endangered anywhere, but the cute and friendly ones became dogs and are everywhere. Cats spread all over the world from the desert because of advantages. Advantages mean you survive and procreate.
- bell-cot 7mo agoSo ever-more vulture capitalists and lawyers, and ever-fewer actual honest workers?
- busterarm 7mo agoNature really doesn't give a crap whether or not others of yours species dominate you, nor how you feel about it. Have a genetic legacy -- That's the only way you win. Or don't and be crying about it.
- vunderba 7mo agoI'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
- cladopa 7mo agoAs 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.
- the_real_cher 7mo agoBilly Bob Thornton dating Angelina Jolie is the quintessential example of this. He had presence and charisma but was very average lookswise. Claviculars head would explode if he saw a picture of them together.
- inaros 7mo agoDont...Always stay below the Hot/Crazy line... https://youtu.be/pInk1rV2VEg https://youtu.be/pInk1rV2VEg
- littlecranky67 7mo agoI'm not sure what or why you use AI for this text (translation?) but even in foreign language universities, it is "von Neumann" - wouldn't be translated as your AI did.
- IncreasePosts 7mo ago> The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody. Tell that to the "hot felon". Because of his mug shot from stealing cars got a modeling deal and married a billionaire heiress
- azan_ 7mo agoThe most interesting results is that the title is true only for females - for males the beauty premium persisted!
- bombcar 7mo agoMale beauty is so powerful it can be transmitted over TCP/IP?
- jimbokun 7mo agoThis feels like a Zoolander quote.
- Jensson 7mo agoMale beauty is mostly being fit, and being fit leads to better outcomes even without biased teachers. Female beauty doesn't correlate to real world performance in the same way, as women that are a bit thinner than optimal health gets rated as the most beautiful.
- jdthedisciple 7mo agoAbsolutely vital insight, yes. Male beauty is arduously acquired, which necessarily means it correlates with other virtues such as great work ethic, persistence, not quitting easily, etc.
- poopdick 7mo ago[dead]
- dickbutt2 7mo ago[flagged]
- j_w 7mo ago> Being fat is now a style a preference. > Being attractive gets you all sorts of unwarranted hatred, targets on your back etc. for doing nothing. I'm not aware of what fantasy land exists where attractive people are hated and being fat is the new style trend. Certainly not there one where GLP-1s become the hottest new pharmaceutical.
- willy_k 7mo agoHow much of this have you actually experienced yourself, as opposed to inferring it from things you’ve read online?
- ozgrakkurt 7mo agoIt is hard to believe research like this means anything while research in real science fields tends to be so nuanced and hard to make conclusions about. This only serves as a tool for people who are trying to find a basis for their beliefs.
- Aurornis 7mo agoThe HN submission title (EDIT: The title is “ Attractive students no longer receive better results as classes moved online ” as I write this, in case it gets updated) isn’t from the paper and isn’t entirely accurate. The paper actually found that male students who scored higher in the beauty ratings continued to get higher grades as well: > On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching. So the submission title’s claim that attractive students no longer receive better results when teachers can see their face isn’t true. The result was only detected for female students. The fact that there is a discrepancy doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the results. When you can only find a significant change after you start subdividing the group into different sub-groups it’s getting a little too close to p-hacking for my comfort. That’s not to say there isn’t a gender effect here, but the fact that males rating high on the beauty scores also got higher grades should suggest that this isn’t as simple as teachers biasing their grades based on what the students looked like.
- mjh2539 7mo agoPerhaps there is a stronger causal relationship between attractiveness in males and intelligence/academic performance than in women.
- jamilton 7mo agoThat seems like a pretty reasonable subdivision to me. Culturally there are differences in what it means to be attractive as a male or female, so it follows that the effects could be different.
- jdthedisciple 7mo ago> Culturally Surely you mean biologically
- exoji2e 7mo agoThis got a lot of headlines in local press when it was released (2022). The author was a PhD student, but also at the time teaching one of the 6 classes included in the study. https://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/studenter-hojer-rosten-mot-snygghetsstudien-nu-ska-den-granskas/ https://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/studenter-hojer-rosten-mot-s...
- randusername 7mo agoScience headlines are awful, but why must we suffer such vague abstracts. How about: "We rated 307 Swedish industrial design students by facial attractiveness and after controlling for socieconomic factors found that males with attractive faces retained a statistically significant grade advantage before and during COVID remote learning whereas females with attractive faces lost their pre-pandemic grade advantage. The beauty premium is only visible in qualitative subjects, not quantitative ones. We don't quantify the extent of the beauty premium in this report."
- HPsquared 7mo agoA "good voice" could become more important. I could see people doing speech and voice training. Also things like lighting, mic and camera setup, and background. Everyone is a streamer now.
- ryguz 7mo ago[dead]