The Greatest Invention Ever for Ugly People
There's an annual symposium on undergraduate research held on campus here, featuring students from all disciplines talking about work that they've done with faculty. It really spans quite a wide variety of topics, from stuff that would be more at home in an SF con ("Better Homes and Gardens on Mars-- Terraforming the Red Planet as Science (Fiction)") to social sciences ("An Economic Analysis of the Effectiveness of D.A.R.E."), to pure, hard science ("Basis Function Expansion for Coupled Integral Equations in Quantum Field Theory").
The award for Best Topic of the Day (at least of talks that I saw) goes to "Beauty and Academic Performance." This was the thesis work of a student in Economics, who surveyed the senior class about their grades and various other traits, and then had pictures of the respondants rated as to "beauty" by students at another college. Analyzing these data, she found a significant negative correlation between attractiveness and GPA. That is, ugly people got better grades.
Future work will probably attempt to explain how to reconcile this with studies that have shown that attractive people tend to have higher salaries. One possible explanation was put forward by a biologist on the faculty: Maybe all the ugly people who get good grades go on to become college faculty, and don't make very much money.
Of course, it'd take a lot of college faculty to make up for these guys, so maybe that theory needs work...
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