Is this real or just another trope in the supposed war on women?

Scott Jaschik reports at Inside Higher Ed.

Graded on Looks

Professors differ on how much their grading should be based on tests, written assignments, labs, class participation and other factors.

But students’ looks? Most faculty members would deny that physical appearance is a legitimate criterion in grading. But a study presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association finds that — among similarly qualified female students — those who are physically attractive earn better grades than others. For male students, there is no significant relationship between attractiveness and grades. And the results hold true whether the faculty member is a man or a woman.

The study was conducted at Metropolitan State University of Denver (an open-enrollment institution with many nontraditional-age students), by two economists there, Rey Hernández-Julián and Christina Peters.

The two economists obtained student identification photographs and had the attractiveness rated, on a scale of 1-10, of all the students. (The researchers recruited people who were not students or faculty members to rate the students’ attractiveness.) Then they examined 168,092 course grades awarded to the students, using factors such as ACT scores to control for student academic ability.

For female students, an increase of one standard deviation in attractiveness was associated with a 0.024 increase in grade (on a 4.0 scale).

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. When the researchers divided the women into three groups — average, more attractive and less attractive — they found a very small (and not statistically significant) gain for the above average attractiveness women. But for the least attractive third of women, the average course grade was 0.067 grade points below those earned by others, a statistically significant gap.