They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If the beholder is your student, it may well pay if they think you're good-looking.

In a study examining the links between looks and college course ratings, two researchers at the University of Texas found classes conducted by attractive professors were more likely to win top marks from students.

In their study, "Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity," Daniel Hamermesh and Amy Parker note student course ratings are often a factor in setting salaries, suggesting looks might affect pay.

While they do not claim student ratings are necessarily good benchmarks of a teacher's classroom productivity, Hamermesh and Parker say their findings "leave little doubt" perceived good looks do indeed drive up the scores.

The study was recently posted on the Web site of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research.

The researchers chose six students -- three men and three women -- to judge the looks of 94 University of Texas faculty members and examined ratings on 463 courses those professors had taught.

"The effects of differences in beauty on the average course rating are not small," they found.

They also discovered minority faculty received lower evaluations than majority professors and that non-native English speakers fared worse than natives, which they said could either signal discrimination by students or reflect difficulties those teachers have transmitting knowledge.

Hamermesh and Parker say the biggest question arising from their research is whether students are discriminating against less-attractive professors or whether they actually learn less from them.

"What if students simply pay more attention to good-looking professors and learn more?" they ask rhetorically. "We would argue that this is a productivity effect."

Still, they admit it's tough to parse fully why better-looking professors rate higher. "Disentangling whether this outcome represents productivity or discrimination is ... probably impossible."

(Agencies)