Discussion

Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching☆

Mistletoe: I wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?

CodeyWhizzBang: The 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.

jdthedisciple: Perhaps some other (hidden) premium that only shows in males, like a confidence premium?

cubefox: "possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021)" - This might be a hint that male attractiveness is correlated with IQ. Explicitly mentioning associations with IQ is taboo in academia.

lapcat: I wouldn't place much stock in small studies like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

isaacfrond: I wouldn't either. The difference for female and males reeks for the law of small numbers.

mikert89: People underestimate how specific the genetic pools are that relate to high intelligence

aurareturn: One 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.

keiferski: Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

StefanBatory: And 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.

crims0n: > 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.

christophilus: We 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: That'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: Universities 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.

jostmey: It could still be more fair than no standardized testing

alistairSH: The US has plenty of exams, starting in early primary school. All states have Standards of Learning (SOL) exams every few years on the main subjects. Then, starting in high school, you have a combination of Advanced Placement (AP) subject exams (college level, often granting college credit) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams, Scholastic Aptitude (SAT) or American College Test (ACT), SAT2 subject exams, and probably a few I've forgotten.The SAT or ACT are technically the only ones "required" for college, but most of the elite schools expect AP or IB (which tends to give the students a year or two of calculus, a fourth year of foreign language, and some deeper dives into other sciences or social studies).But, because it's split across so many tests, there's no single "score poorly and your life is ruined" exam.

atwrk: And have you tried to find out why IQ associations are "taboo" in academia?

eager_learner: meaning what exactly ?

mystraline: Its basically anything that sticks by saying "China Bad, USA Good".

everdrive: >is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities.The road to hell is built on good intentions.

steve1977: I don't know this specific exam, but most of these can be gamed in the sense of learning to the test. So depending on what training resources someone has available (e.g. rich parents who can afford tutors), I'd consider them only partially meritocratic.

xyzzyz: If this is the case, then why doesn’t everyone get the top a score? The answer is, of course, that it’s not so simple, and you can’t just learn to the test.That’s just like with sports: anyone can learn how to train himself, and anyone can improve with training, but in the end, some people will end up faster, and some people will end up slower.

steve1977: My point was exactly that the chances are NOT the same for everyone. A kid from an affluent family might have both better tutoring as well as fewer troubles in life that could deter from learning.But of course, in addition to that, there is always also a genetic component, as in sports.

prasadjoglekar: Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.

shevy-java: Good 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.

coliveira: Because they want to say that China is bad. When, as you say, US is the outlier in inventing strange ways to admit kids to college. I'm from Brazil and the entrance is exam is similar to China, there is a single exam and the note is used to determine which college you can go.

heraldgeezer: China IS bad though.Why glaze China so much when you can be impressed by the west instead.All these zoomers grow up on a China propaganda app.

dsm4ck: Oh honey

shevy-java: Can 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.

heraldgeezer: Another day, another leftie glazing China on HN again :)This site is turning into Reddit

Foobar8568: Who is your parents play a larger role than attractiveness.

dude250711: I guess even attractive males have to work hard.One gender still has to approach, the other gender still waits to be approached.

kxrm: My 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.

dist-epoch: Or maybe it's harder to justify a higher grade on objective tasks like math/physics/...

CalRobert: At the very least, it's complicated. I went to an appallingly bad, fundamentalist religious high school (not my choice) that didn't offer extracurriculars, honors classes (never mind AP!) etc. and if I hadn't been able to do exceedingly well on standardized tests I could not have gotten in to the colleges I did. My parents did not pay for any test prep. I did learn and practice on my own though, which is how I know that evolution does not, in fact, teach that you can grow wings if you want them badly enough.

nyeah: IB may become important for US college admissions over time, but that's more aspirational so far.

alistairSH: True, I only listed it because, at least where I live, high schools often do one program or the other. If it's an IB school, you end up taking the APs on your own (ie, there isn't a class focused on that content, though the IB curriculum should, in theory, end up covering the same stuff, at least for the major subjects).

threethirtytwo: It'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. 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/S01602...And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.

tokai: Because its a small study with a biased population.

picture: China has made for-profit extracurricular tutoring illegal since 2021. [1] Of course there can be under the table operations and discussion to be had about regionally biased gaokao difficulty, but I think it's worth recognizing gaokao being a real chance for upward class mobility, hence why it is so competitive.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy

ModernMech: Oh so that explains it!Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.

alistairSH: The university will argue that a well-rounded student body improves the experience for everybody. IE, a college that's 100% "nerds" won't be as good as college that's 80% "nerds", 10% "smart jocks", and 10% "band geeks" (or whatever other categories you want).I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.

bonoboTP: In Europe, university is treated as education for adults, not your entire life. Most universities are not campus resorts like in the US, but just buildings in the city itself, students live a normal life in the city, they rent a apartment or live in a dorm, take public transit to get to places, do sport at a sport place independent of the university, etc. You can live a well rounded life that way. The university is there so you learn your specialization. Of course people make friends there, but it doesn't have to be your entire life, and the university administrators job is not to meddle with people's social lives to make them "interesting", but to allow learning.

retsibsi: > Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skillsI think this is largely a distraction from the direct effect. For any level of social skill, good-looking people at that level are perceived much more positively than others at the same level.The question of the causal effect between physical attractiveness and social skill is interesting, though. There are plausible stories both ways, imo: your version, and the contrary one saying that pretty people coast on their looks and the rest of us have to try harder to be interesting or appealing in other ways.

lapcat: It's comment catnip for HN though.

h2zizzle: In many instances, attractiveness is tantamount to having social skills. It's not even a matter of developing a more sophisticated skillset; attractive people (and all the people who are subject to affinity bias) are just given the benefit-of-the-doubt more, and more consistently. This is where advice like, "Be yourself," and, "Don't fear rejection," and the idea that, "the only thing stopping someone from connection is their willingness to dare to try," come from: people whose attractiveness has preempted the requirement to really change or consider how they approach interactions.

nyeah: One important thing is whether the tutoring is making better students, or just gaming the test.

CalRobert: And after graduation they can grind leetcode, and after that they can practice social cues to get in the management class. It's gamed tests all the way down.

nyeah: [delayed]

mschuster91: > 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

bjourne: I 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. :)

chii: merit doesn't mean equal wealth spending to obtain a result. And it's not black and white.Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.

TheOtherHobbes: Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring will make their score higher if they have any kind of aptitude. Likewise if they have easy access to books, extra study resources, a quiet space for study, no family distractions or challenges, and so on.Poor people typically have none of those extra resources. Some poor people with extreme talent will be able to overcome the challenges of relative poverty, but others with equal talent won't.It's extremely hard to create a true meritocratic system, and Gaokao certainly isn't it.

Avicebron: > Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic. If there 100 desired spots that are allocated by the exam, and 1000 students, and wealth (tutors/extra time etc) moves the needle enough to make a meaningful difference, it's basically nepotistic just the in-group is who's parents can afford it. Depending on where you are this can compound each generation.

genthree: That it tends to become a caste system with extra steps (which steps provide a defense of the system as “fair”) is one of the chief criticisms of meritocracy (and criticism of the idea is where we got the term itself)

olalonde: I 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.

tyjen: Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Academic resources for success are abundantly available, but they require discipline, time, and effort.

groundzeros2015: Wouldnt wealthy people on average be better educated and potentially more intelligent than the poorest group?I would expect wealthy to always be well represented in test results because they are better at the skills being tested.

TrackerFF: People 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.

elevatortrim: I think being conventionally attractive gives you a lot more chance practice socialising and my observation is that, people who use that chance get so good at it, they remain very good at relationships even at old age.

raincole: Taiwan and Korea have even "fairer" systems. In China different provinces got different test problems. Especially students from Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin get completely different ones. In Taiwan/Korea everyone takes the exact same test.However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. I certainly don't. I do think our standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.YMMV.

h2zizzle: The problem is the high stress generated by the one-shot approach. There has to be a balance between the objectivity of a single test and practical concerns (like choking because you were sick or got bad sleep the night before).Ultimately, the only "fair" outcome is an abundance of opportunity. The vast majority of people are worth something to their community and society. And even then, as long as there's enough food and shelter to go around, no one should have to justify their mere existence.

Revanche1367: I 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.

butILoveLife: While 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.

JR1427: > if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.The problem just shifts. People with attractive voices would then have an advantage.

butILoveLife: Ive seen the opposite in some people.I know a ~55ish year old lady who is beautiful, but looks 55. I see her adjusting to her new reality and its painful. I imagine she used to be able to get away with being mean and sarcastic because she was so hot.Now it just causes office fights. "I wont work with X" is something Ive heard.The interesting part is that I originally only worked with her on the phone, so I always thought she was mean... Then I saw her in person and everything clicked.

CalRobert: I lost 100 pounds and as amazing as it was that everyone (not just potential mates but literally EVERYONE, even family) no longer thought I was lazy and was just… nicer to me - was honestly kind of depressing. And I was an active fat person! I often did 50+ mile bike rides when I weighed 280.People aren’t much more sophisticated than our ape brethren at the end of the day.There’s a decent anime exploring this on Netflix right now. “Lookism” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt22297722/

torginus: I 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: Best 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.)

CalRobert: The uggos I guess

tock: How is China bad? Their education system did take them from absolute poverty to #2 superpower in a few decades.

mikkupikku: Tutors barely move exam scores, particularly if they're only hired for test prep. You can crush tests without cramming, tutors or any of that if you just pay attention in class and do all optional homework.

threethirtytwo: No. These aren't beauty. It's status symbols. They are symbols of power, capability and utility. Men are judged by raw power and capability. The industry for beauty for men is more of a way for men to advertise raw capability. It is not "beauty" for "beauties" sake.The beauty industry for women is purely superficial. Make up for example. Now there are things like expensive jewelry... but this stuff doesn't help women in terms of attractiveness. Jewelry is more of a status symbol for women advertising their status to other women: "Look at what my man got me, look at the power and status of a man that is in love with my beauty."That is not to say beauty doesn't help men. But it does to a much less degree than women. Also your citation is a news article documenting a phenomenon. You need numbers to answer the question: Is this phenomenon an anomaly?? Or is it common place.I think the answer is obvious.

buildbot: Every professor has their own style, most of the ones I had were very open that office hours were a pretty great way to get help/more targeted hints on what to study. This isn’t in my opinion, a problem. Their goal is to educate you as best as possible in theory, via classes, homework, and office hours. Students who take the time and effort to attend office hours clearly want to at least pretend to be putting in extra effort, so why wouldn’t they out more effort into helping them learn? I doubt that they are directly giving away test answers.

debatem1: What's unfair about office hours? At least at my school they were posted in advance and available to any student at no charge.

PeterStuer: An 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.

loremium: aren't online curses a lot text only which inherently is harder to communicate

HPsquared: I find even something as simple as a haircut can have a massive effect.

Ekaros: So wouldn't it then be fairest to punish kids with high income or high wealth parents? Say set median household income. If parents make double this the score is automatically halved. If they make half it is doubled. Same on gross wealth. More wealth there is bigger the cut.This would mean that says Musk's kids would need to get sufficiently higher scores than children of someone with no wealth.

jstanley: I noticed the same thing after I started dressing smarter.

PurpleRamen: > 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.All the slim ghosts might think different here.

xyzelement: This is a benefit. Being healthy and fit is objectively great for you. That your peers subtly nudge you in that direction is great. And in contrast, I feel horrible about "body positivity" - making you feel good about an objective problem that's incapacitating and killing you is a huge problem.

adrian_b: Tutoring can provide some advantage to the richer, but at least in my anecdotal experience I have never seen the advantage provided by tutors being able to match what really motivated poorer students could achieve by self study, at least not in the countries where in the past there was good access to public libraries, or today there may exist cheap Internet access.