Attractive female students’ grades dropped during remote learning: Study

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Pretty privilege?

Female college students who happen to be aesthetically pleasing earned lower grades during the COVID-19 pandemic, a recent study found.

Adrian Mehic, a post-doctoral researcher at Lund University and study author, analyzed the scores of 300 male and female engineering students in Sweden before and after the coronavirus hit.

A panel of more than 70 separate individuals was asked to rate the attractiveness of each student.

Mehic found a significant decline in the average grades of the “attractive” female students, but only in courses where teachers and students were more likely to interact.

The “non-quantitative” courses include business and economics where exams and assignments are graded subjectively.

However, the effect was not found for “quantitative” courses like math and physics.

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“I’m interested in discrimination generally,” Mehic told PsyPost. “In economics research, lots of attention is given to discrimination based on gender and/or race. While these are important issues, there has not been much research on beauty-based discrimination in the educational setting, so the paper fills a gap there.”

He added: “Also, the pandemic made discrimination based on appearance much more difficult, since teachers could not readily see students’ faces. Whereas discrimination on for instance gender is possible in the online setting also, as long as you have the names of students.”

The study that is good for no one’s ego, titled “Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching” and published in Economics Letters, also noted there was no similar trend among the male students, which surprised Mehic.

“The main takeaway is that there is a beauty premium both for males and for females when teaching is on-site, but for females, this effect disappeared when teaching was conducted online,” Mehic explained.

“This, at least to me, suggests that the beauty premium for males is due to some productive attribute (for instance, them having higher self-confidence) rather than discrimination, whereas it is due to discrimination for women.”

He added that determining why people discriminate based on appearance is a difficult task and more research needs to be done, but he hypothesized, “Probably, it’s because when we see an attractive person, we assign them some characteristics that they may not actually possess, such as intelligence.”