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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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the SAT and ACT, and those are objective. The wealthy still pass disproportionately due to better tutoring specifically oriented to those tests. It’s Goodhart’s law.

That's fair, but... What's the alternative? Obviously someone's going to have better academic performance if you have tutors, there's no way around. Still, if you have good academic performance - you have it. American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic pe…

One important thing is whether the tutoring is making better students, or just gaming the test.

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

#52

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…

very important observation indeed, if that wasn't accounted for it means much less to me

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

#53

One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.

[flagged]

Balances out the mass media. Drink propaganda from both sides. Healthier for you.

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

#54

One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.

And a side note from me as a Pole - online I see many Americans speaking about how cruel Gaokao is, but... It's America that's outlier. I had the same style of exam in Poland to get to uni, and it's the same in the entire EU, and rest of the world. So I have no idea why Gaokao is singled out.

>and it's the same in the entire EU

That's not true.

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

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT. I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

China has made for-profit extracurricular tutoring illegal since 2021. [1] Of course there can be under the table operations and discussion to be had about regionally biased gaokao difficulty, but I think it's worth recognizing gaokao being a real chance for upward class mobility, hence why it is so competitive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy

Oh so that explains it!

Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.

Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.

But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.

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

#57

I wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?

It's easy. For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty. They are judged by it and the core of their power stems from it. That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. That is why women "care" about beauty much more than men. They know that beauty = power.

Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman.

And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else.

We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution.

Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here.

I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too.

Edit: I looked it up, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.

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

#58
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has plenty of exams, starting in early primary school. All states have Standards of Learning (SOL) exams every few years on the main subjects. Then, starting in high school, you have a combination of Advanced Placement (AP) subject exams (college level, often granting college credit) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams, Scholastic Aptitude (SAT) or American College Test (ACT), SAT2 subject exams, and pro…

IB may become important for US college admissions over time, but that's more aspirational so far.

True, I only listed it because, at least where I live, high schools often do one program or the other. If it's an IB school, you end up taking the APs on your own (ie, there isn't a class focused on that content, though the IB curriculum should, in theory, end up covering the same stuff, at least for the major subjects).

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

#59

One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.

Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT. I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

At the very least, it's complicated. I went to an appallingly bad, fundamentalist religious high school (not my choice) that didn't offer extracurriculars, honors classes (never mind AP!) etc. and if I hadn't been able to do exceedingly well on standardized tests I could not have gotten in to the colleges I did. My parents did not pay for any test prep. I did learn and practice on my own though, which is how I know that evolution does not, in fact, teach that you can grow wings if you want them badly enough.

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

#60
post #6

> 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. I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally at…

Or maybe it's harder to justify a higher grade on objective tasks like math/physics/...
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