BEAUTY may be more than skin deep after all. New research suggests that good-looking people do better in exams and thus probably in later life, than the plain or downright ugly.

In the study, better looking students achieved superior results in both oral and written exams — the latter marked anonymously — suggesting that success is not just down to teachers favouring attractive students but to superior natural ability.

Debate has raged for years among sociologists and economists over “the beauty factor”. Most research, beginning with Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel prizewinning economist, has suggested that discrimination, whether because of looks, height or race, is due to observed physical characteristics.

The significance of the new research is that even where testing is “blind”, good-looking people do better. One reason for this, the researchers suggest, is that attractive children get more attention from their parents. Even more important is that good looks lead to higher self-esteem. Attractive people may be more confident and work harder.

“Physical appearance has a significant and economically meaningful effect on the performance of students,” said the authors of the study led by Giam Pietro Cipriani, associate professor of economics at the University of Verona in Italy.

“First of all, being handsome increases the probability that a student in fact takes and passes exams,” said Cipriani. “Second, and more important for us, better looking students have better performances than other students.”

The study — presented to the annual conference of the European Society for Population Economics in Verona — will reignite the debate on whether good-looking people get on in life through talent or beauty. Previous research has shown that better looking people have more success at job interviews and in finding a spouse.

Examples of the theory could include the English actress Rachel Weisz, star of The Constant Gardener, who attended St Paul’s school in London before going on to study English literature at Cambridge University Cipriani and Angelo Zago, his colleague, looked at the exam results of 885 economics students at an unidentified Italian university over three years from 2001.

A close-up facial photograph of each student was assessed by five professors who rated them on looks ranging from 5 (beautiful or handsome) through to 1 (homely). Their results were then merged to produce one beauty grade for each student.

Matching the ratings against the exam results, they found that those graded 4 for looks achieved a 36% better performance than those graded 2.

Cipriani and Zago concluded that the reasons for the results could be twofold: “The higher productivity of attractive people could be the result of pure discrimination because of parental (and teacher) solicitude or of social stereotypes that affect self-esteem and motivation and hence productivity via a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Even if good-looking students do not have their marks boosted by doting teachers and lecturers, they may still be benefiting from educational discrimination in their favour. The authors do not discount the possibility that teachers make a beeline for the lookers in their classes and devote more attention to them.

Tim Hands, headmaster of Portsmouth grammar school, said he did not think good-looking pupils performed better in exams but he did not discount the theory that they might be more confident, which could mean better results.

“Although I have never heard it debated in academic circles at university or in schools, I suppose it could have to do with the inner confidence one would have going into exams,” said Hands.

“There are also those children who are more confident who will come forward in class and ask more questions. But a good teacher should counter-balance that by making sure all pupils have answered questions equally and have all said something in class.”

Other studies have found that looks can directly affect success. A survey last year of 11,000 33-year-olds by London Metropolitan University found that unattractive men earned 15% less than those who were deemed attractive, while plain women earned 11% less than their prettier colleagues.

A recent study from the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina found that tall people earned £400 more a year than their shorter colleagues. Research suggests that tall people do better in life because they are more likely to be chosen for positions of authority — prefects, head boys and head girls — when at school.

A Norwegian study has found that good looks can be an advantage in escaping the long arm of the law. Good-looking students got lighter sentences. This applied even when they were tried in absentia as long as words such as “handsome” or “pretty” were used in describing their appearance.

“We put in a simple word and found that the attractiveness stereotype was activated,” said Professor Per Schioldborg of the University of Oslo, who carried out the research.

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