Attractive female students appeared to lose the grade advantage they had in face-to-face classes after teaching moved online, a study has found.
The study, published in 2022 and titled Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching, examined how facial attractiveness shaped academic performance under different forms of instruction.
It focused on engineering students at Lund University in Sweden and used the shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began on March 17, 2020, to compare results before and after online teaching started.
The findings showed that during in-person teaching, attractive students were more likely to receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects such as business, marketing and economics, where lecturers had more contact with students through seminars, oral presentations and group assignments.
The study found that the link between beauty and grades was stronger in courses with more teacher-student interaction and less dependent on written examinations alone. It said “beauty is positively related to academic outcomes” in such settings.
That pattern was seen in both male and female students when classes were held physically. But it did not appear in quantitative subjects such as mathematics and physics, where assessment relied mainly on final written exams and involved less direct contact between students and lecturers.
The pattern changed after classes moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study found that the grades of attractive female students fell in non-quantitative courses after the switch to remote learning. It said their grades “deteriorated in non-quantitative courses” once teaching moved online, suggesting that the earlier advantage they seemed to enjoy in face-to-face classes had faded.
For male students, however, the picture was different.
The paper found that attractive male students still appeared to enjoy a grade advantage even after classes moved online. It said “the beauty premium persisted for males,” suggesting that the effect for men may not have depended only on visibility in the classroom.
According to the researcher, this may point to other traits linked to attractiveness, including confidence, persistence and social influence, which may help performance in interactive and group-based courses.
To reach its findings, the researcher analysed data from 307 students across five cohorts in the engineering programme. Grades were standardised, while facial attractiveness was rated by 74 independent people using publicly available student photographs.
The study also accounted for age, gender, parental income, home municipality income and the gender of the instructor in a bid to isolate the role appearance may have played in academic outcomes.
It added that non quantitative courses involved more interaction based activities, while quantitative subjects depended mostly on written examinations. That difference, the paper said, may help explain why attractiveness mattered more in some subjects than in others.
The researcher argued that the move to online teaching during COVID-19 made it easier to isolate the effect of appearance because the structure of the courses remained the same even though the mode of teaching changed.
The paper concluded that the earlier advantage seen among attractive female students in physical classrooms may have been driven largely by discrimination. It said “the return to facial beauty is likely to be primarily due to discrimination for females.”
