Attractive Students Performs Better Than Unattractive Students In I-Person Education – Study
Attractive students obtain higher grades in in-person education than unattractive students, according to a study on the relationship between facial attractiveness and academic performance.
In non-quantitative disciplines, teachers tend to contact students more frequently than in quantitative courses.
The findings, according to Swedish specialists based on a peer-reviewed study published by Elsevier, a global leader in information and analytics for health, and conducted under various modes of instruction utilizing data from Swedish engineering students, are the same for both men and women.
When non-quantitative topics were taught online during the coronavirus outbreak, the grades of attractive female students dropped.
However, the beauty premium persisted for boys, indicating that discrimination is a significant component in explaining the grade beauty premium for just females.
Beauty premium
In addition, they note that the results imply a positive relationship between physical attractiveness and academic achievement, but only in non-quantitative courses, which rely more on teacher-student interactions.
“The beauty premium on grades in non-quantitative subjects holds for both male and female students. Then, using the Covid-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, and utilising a difference-in-difference framework, we found that switching to full online teaching resulted in deteriorated grades in non-quantitative courses for attractive females.”
However, they reveal that there was still a substantial beauty premium for handsome men.
Taken together, these findings show that the return to facial beauty is most likely the outcome of discrimination against females and is a productive feature in males.
What Kenyan professors say
In an exclusive interview with the Nation, Ms. Katherine Muhatia, a senior lecturer in Journalism and Mass Communication at the Multimedia University of Kenya, revealed that the beauty of a student varies from lecturer to lecturer, despite the fact that there are pupils who stand out.
She says “attractive” implies “intellectual.” However, there are those individuals that stand out due to the way they dress, style their hair, or apply lipstick; therefore, what she finds attractive may not be attractive to others.
“Attractive could mean intelligent, eloquent in the way they present their work or their grasp of academic issues,” she said, revealing that the findings of the study have been a hot topic of discussion among her colleagues, given that many academic institutions in the country have largely shifted to virtual learning as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to some dons (lecturers), it is arduous and time-consuming to sift through, say, 100 scripts in search of an ‘attractive student.’
However, academic environments are about connecting intelligently, and academically attractive students make you look at their scripts in a special way.
Ms. Christabel Mideva, a law instructor at the University of Embu, concurs with Ms. Muhatia that in-person teaching helps put faces to scripts during grading, as opposed to virtual instruction, which removes students’ faces because they do not turn on their cameras.
She says when classes are in-person, you can pick up on a student who is attractive by virtue of being intelligent because they always want to engage lecturers even after class, and compared to virtual classes, in-person classes have human interaction that creates a connection, although the connection need not be emotional.
Dr. Joshua Okemwa, a lecturer in computer science in Nairobi, concurs with the study’s conclusions.
“The challenge with teaching virtually is that more tech-savvy students have an upper hand, grades of attractive students declined in my view because attractive female students need undivided attention and would like more in-person time for a personal touch with their facilitator for them to understand things better.”
Attractive Students Performs Better Than Unattractive Students In I-Person Education – Study