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Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

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Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#281

Post by Aurornis »

jeremie_strand wrote: post #116

[flagged]

I don’t think it’s that simple. My assistant professor friends build relationships with students and help them work on topics and weaknesses. They get to know students and how to help them on problem areas.

For deeper courses they may help them pick topics to write about and sources to read.

Having that context for the ongoing feedback from grading and mentoring is valuable. Depending on the work it simply might not be possible to do anything blind.

Even without names, handwriting and writing styles are obvious. Even in an office setting I can always tell who wrote something as small as a sign or a note by handwriting or word choice alone.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#282

Post by IncreasePosts »

buildbot wrote: post #126
olalonde wrote: post #92

I remember in college there were always small groups of students chatting with professors after class or going to office hours. Many profs would drop pretty big hints about upcoming exams. I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation". Always felt a bit unfair to me.

Every professor has their own style, most of the ones I had were very open that office hours were a pretty great way to get help/more targeted hints on what to study. This isn’t in my opinion, a problem. Their goal is to educate you as best as possible in theory, via classes, homework, and office hours. Students who take the time and effort to attend office hours clearly want to at least pretend to be putting in extr…

In an astrophysics class I had in college , the professor called on a student to solve a problem, he got it wrong, and the professor said "if you would come to my office hours you would know how to solve this" - the students response was something along the lines of "sorry, my parents are crackheads so I need to work two jobs to pay for school"

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#283

Post by ghaff »

mikrl wrote: post #267
ghaff wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many years in large corporations, pretty much the only acceptable dress was white shirt, tie, dark suit, and dress shoes. We were still wearing something like that at. trade shows into the 1990s before things started loosening up. (Mildly funny story. One big, probably Unix, show the IBM staff showed in logoed polos and suddenly everyone else is like If IBM doesn’t need suits we sure don’t.)

I started dressing nice at work, reasoning that looking sharp would buy me a few seconds or minutes of grace to allow my social deficiencies to catch up - just in case an executive decided to ask me a question. Of course, that never happened for months, years until the one day I went in wearing cargo pants and a gothy synth band shirt and was greeted by a delegation of executives from out of town engaging everyone in…

I worked for a downtown firm for a while which loosened up dress code a little bit so I didn’t always wear my jacket in—though cargo pants and rock T would definitely have led to an HR meeting. One day I had to borrow a jacket from someone when I had to go to a nearby studio for a TV interview:-)

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#284

Post by cindyllm »

WarmWash wrote: post #131
TrackerFF wrote: post #68

People that have used to be fat, and then lost a lot of weight, will know how brutally different people will treat you. Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you. Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bi…

>Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident Having been one of the people who experienced this (well the inverse, scarily skinny to lean and muscular), the confidence comes entirely from people in your life congratulating you, followed by strangers and new people just having a baseline positive glow towards you. I don't know who came up with that line, it's repeated a lot, but…

[dead]

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#285

Post by pixelatedindex »

BurningFrog wrote: post #233
simonask wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this stance is that the alternative (making people feel bad) will exacerbate the problem by contributing to feelings of hopelessness and ostracism. The first prerequisite for making difficult changes is a supportive environment - not a judgmental one.

> the alternative (making people feel bad) The actual alternative is to tell the fat people that they really need to fix their serious health problem! Politely watching them die before you is maybe comfortable, but pretty messed up.

I’m sure they know, pointing it out doesn’t solve anything.

> Politely watching them die before you is maybe comfortable, but pretty messed up.

I disagree. It’s their choice, and they should be free to do what they want and not be criticized. In fact it’s not comfortable and sometimes I do want to say something but that’s not very kind.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#286

Post by bell-cot »

busterarm wrote: post #162
pm90 wrote: post #152

Our society has a lot of pretty privilege (and tall privilege for male identifying humans). Taking steps to address this is welcome.

Why though? Maybe the advantages are natural and our species is selecting for it.

"Advantages" are often to the individual's benefit, but the species' detriment.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#287

Post by mjh2539 »

Aurornis wrote: post #258

The HN submission title (EDIT: The title is “ Attractive students no longer receive better results as classes moved online ” as I write this, in case it gets updated) isn’t from the paper and isn’t entirely accurate. The paper actually found that male students who scored higher in the beauty ratings continued to get higher grades as well: > On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty prem…

Perhaps there is a stronger causal relationship between attractiveness in males and intelligence/academic performance than in women.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#288

Post by davidhalter »

PeterStuer wrote: post #27

An alternative story could be that the women’s presented appearance online may have changed more than men’s and that real appearance changes could weaken the correlation between the paper’s stored photo-based beauty score and what instructors actually saw live. Maybe woman changed grooming effort more than men, or the effects of fashion trends that explicitly drove the woman towards less attractive styles etc. if tha…

Attractive females might also have different behavior in remote teaching. Attractiveness directly affects how people behave and feel. This might also be different for males vs. females.

I'm sure that attractiveness does play a role for grades, it's just not nearly as simple as the paper puts it.

There are a lot of potential explanations, which is why these kinds of studies are unfortunately not that helpful and often cause questionable media coverage.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#289

Post by wakawaka28 »

norome wrote: post #141
butILoveLife wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive seen the opposite in some people. I know a ~55ish year old lady who is beautiful, but looks 55. I see her adjusting to her new reality and its painful. I imagine she used to be able to get away with being mean and sarcastic because she was so hot. Now it just causes office fights. "I wont work with X" is something Ive heard. The interesting part is that I originally only worked with her on the phone, so I always…

plenty of mean and sarcastic ugly people around too

In my opinion, a lot of ugly people start off by trying to be nice, then gradually become more bitter and cynical the more they have to take shit from other people. At least I feel like that has happened to me, and I'm not even so ugly (imho). The amount of gaslighting I've put up with from everyone over the years has really been infuriating and has led me to a lot of misery in my life, and also turned me away from the things that might have actually made a difference.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#290

Post by libraryatnight »

TrackerFF wrote: post #68

People that have used to be fat, and then lost a lot of weight, will know how brutally different people will treat you. Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you. Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bi…

I've experienced this personally while losing weight. Some people will argue for the confidence thing, and it's a factor I'm sure, but there's a palpable difference in treatment. Also the trauma/trust issues that come from being seen as 'less than' don't resolve over night, and it takes some time of that palpable change to help build the confidence.
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