Better-looking students get better grades
Better-looking students get better grades — but not in online classes
Two economists knew that appearance matters: Studies had shown all sorts of benefits linked to attractiveness, everything from dating to salaries to ratings of how well professors teach classes. But they weren’t sure whether better-looking people earn more money and are more likely to be considered smart just because they’re easy on the eyes. Maybe factors, such as confidence or greater effort, were the real reason for the differences studies had found.
Rey Hernández-Julián and Christina Peters set out to test that at Metropolitan State University of Denver. What they found surprised them.
Students who were rated as attractive got better grades than those who were not. But when the researchers looked at courses that were online-only, they didn’t find the same benefit for either men or women.
The better-looking the students are, the greater the difference in grades between online and traditional classes, Hernández-Julián explained, with the students getting better grades in classes where they could be seen.
“We really thought it was just that more attractive people have other personality traits, other skills,” Peters, an associate professor at MSU Denver, said. “But it does appear to be some type of actual discrimination on the part of the professors. That surprised us.”
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I thought that this was an interesting look at how people "see" things. Apparently, we do more than judge a book by its cover.
So that's the reason I graduated with honors.
Mystery solved.