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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Attractive girls may also have more offers to help them study, be more popular generally, etc., all of which also ceased to matter during government imposed remote learning

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Attractiveness is at least partially mutable (grooming, diet, etc). Caring for oneself and getting good grades are both, to an extent, downstream from being in a good place mentally.

That's a new angle I had never considered before, thank you. I have certainly hypothesized before that most people could be quite attractive if they took good care of themselves (exercise, sleep, etc) but I never connected that idea as a possible factor in the performance gap.

It's hard to argue that looking good isn't any advantage, but this could be an interesting nuance.

>The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction.

>Grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely.

It looks like this study has done well to isolate the effect one's attractiveness has on a teacher's marking.

Just not being fat generally helps. I don't believe in fat shaming, and in most cases I don't think being fat is a sign of bad character, but I've had the experience of being fat (225 lbs at my heaviest) and dropping all that weight (today I'm 158 lbs at 11% BF). The difference in how the public treats you is night and day. People are friendlier and generally assume that you are more competent, sometimes overly so. If you want to be liked, be lean. Sorry to say it.

Facial bone structure is probably the most difficult thing to fix apart from height.

I was also around 210 lbs at my heaviest and wow the treatment is indeed different.

I think the second chin made me look quite unattractive - it's damn hard to get rid of it along with the beer belly heh

Right, instead of shaming it’s healthier to promote being your best self (carrot vs stick). I wasn’t able to be shamed out of addiction to cheap snack food, but I was able to change after I changed my mindset and the habit just didn’t fit my new tenets, my self-perception.

Society is so sensitive though that any message of improving yourself is interpreted as “shaming”, which hurts the individual.

Fat aside, it's all about the jawline.

That was my first reaction, but:

The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction.

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.

If it was about getting study help, the effect would be mirrored in quantitative courses.

The study addressed part of your hypothesis and found no evidence. There was no “beauty” effect found in courses where grades were quantitative instead of qualitative - where the grader presumably had less liberty to nudge grades up or down. This was prior to the switch to remote learning.

Presumably popularity and ability to garner help with studying would be the same for qualitative and quantitative courses.

Could we please stop with the Trumpist framing? The pandemic "imposed" the need for safety measures. The fact that our government (usually, at least) went along with what was obviously required to protect citizens' lives is not a reason to adopt this MAGA way of talking about it.

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