Attractive females saw their grades drop when classes and exams moved online during the pandemic, a study suggests.
Adrian Mehic, a post-doctoral researcher at Lund University, analyzed the scores of 300 male and female engineering students in Sweden before and after Covid hit.
A panel of more than 70 separate participants to grade the attractiveness of each student based on photographs of their faces.
The study found a significant decline in average college grades among attractive female students — but only in 'qualitative' courses where teachers and students were more likely to interact.
These include classes like business and economics, where exams and coursework are graded subjectively.
In quantitative courses — like math and physics — where answers are usually simply correct or incorrect, the same trend was not observed. There was also no trend among males.
Grades from the first two years of a five-year engineering program were pulled - because they featured more general studies instead of specialized courses.
After controlling for age, gender, and the gender of the professor in each course, Mehic found that there was a clear benefit to attractive students in qualitative courses
He said the benefit was not enough to carry a floundering student to the top of the class, but did give a small boost of a few percentage points.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Sweden, and much of the world, in early 2020, schools were forced to use video apps like Zoom for instruction.
In many cases, professors would not even know how many of their students looked and face-to-face interactions were near extinct.
During this period, the benefits that attractive female students had in qualitative courses disappeared
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...