Good-looking female students no longer get straight A’s when classes are virtual | Hacker News Reader

Good-looking female students no longer get straight A’s when classes are virtual

globalpulsenews.com

This study was done at my uni, and the legitimacy and rigor of it was questioned and investigated by the university. However, it was ultimately not deemed to be inappropriate. Some interesting info is that the single picture that was shown to the "jury" of a student was handpicked by the author from Facebook, and that the jury consisted of high school students.

More info: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/snygghetsstudien-ar-...

They don’t say whether the author knew the grades when selecting the images. They also don’t say whether the jurors knew the grades. As long as they didn’t know I doubt that it had an impact on the study.

You could skew the results if you knew the grades but it wouldn’t be easy.

> the legitimacy and rigor of it was questioned and investigated by the university. However, it was ultimately not deemed to be inappropriate.

Does your uni routinely question and investigate the rigor of all its studies, or only ones where it doesn't like the findings?

The reason it was questioned was that some women felt uncomfortable by having their images pulled from social media and rated for attractiveness as part of the study, without having been asked or informed. But ultimately the ethics people decided that it was fine after all.

Does it really surprise anyone that being good looking is a positive trait in anything that involves a human relation? This goes both for men and woman

No, but society loves to pretend otherwise.

> Any attractiveness advantage observed during remote classes is more likely due to a productivity-enhancing effect than discrimination.

Suppose the advantage is not that profs descriminate based on beauty but that pretty people get invited to everyone's study group. Wouldn't remote learning lesson that too? Is that the sort of thing they mean by "productivity-enhancing"?

And they want everyone to go back to the office?

The Elizabeth Holmes maneuver.

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234248

Good-looking female students didn't get straight A's when I was in college, shortly after the ice age. Now, I did know one good-looking female student who got straight A's (briefly my girlfriend), but she was very intelligent and very hard-working.

Or did they? Honestly, I never ever inquired into anyone's grades while in school. But I did know a couple of quite good-looking young women who were still enrolled at the school after four years: any time they sensed trouble ahead in a class, they'd drop while they still could without damaging the report card.

> Good-looking female students didn't get straight A's when I was in college

> Or did they? Honestly, I never ever inquired into anyone's grades

And this is why we do studies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com