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University of Denver

Study: Attractive female students get better grades

Walbert Castillo
USA TODAY

Beauty may be (only) skin deep, but it might also help those considered conventionally pretty get good grades.

At least that's the finding of a recent study, "Student Appearance and Academic Performance," which found that "attractive" female students earn higher grades than "unattractive" ones.

This correlation did not hold true for most male students.

According to the study, young women considered pretty had a 0.024 increase in grades on a 4.0 scale, earning grades that are 0.005 higher than average-looking students.

“We’re not talking about a D student that’s being brought up to an A because she’s attractive," said Christina Peters, co-author of the study and a Metropolitan State University of Denver associate professor. "Instead, the magnitude of the effects that we find is about half the distance between an A- and a B+. The difference is there and it’s significant and can potentially be disconcerting, but it’s a small effect — it doesn’t mean the attractive females are getting into Harvard and unattractive ones aren’t.”

Peters and co-author Rey Hernández-Julián examined more than 6,500 student ID-card photographs and more than 168,00 course grades awarded to the students, using factors such as ACT scores to control for student academic ability, reported Inside Higher Ed. It also reported that the "attractiveness gap in grades appears to result more from lower grades for less attractive women than from higher grades for the most attractive women."

The study was conducted, said Peters, because they were intrigued by the “large literature” in economics and social sciences that found evidence for appearance-based discrimination in wages and hiring. They wanted to determine if the differences in the labor market stemmed from early stages of life, which include schooling. Most importantly, she says they wanted to identify the mechanisms in why appearance affects these outcomes.

The reasoning behind this data might be because more attractive people are more confident, which translates into better performance with certain activities like in-class and online presentations, Hernández-Julians said.

"In terms of the bigger picture of this study, this speaks to the implicit biases that we have not just in terms of physical appearance but in terms of race and gender and discrimination and all levels," Peters said. "I hope this (study) contributes to the bigger policy discussion that should be happening on what we can do about these implicit biases, which many people do not realize we're consciously doing."

Walbert Castillo is a student at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and is a USA TODAY College visual producer.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.

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