Do gender and physical attractiveness affect college grades?

In this study I use data on grades awarded for bachelor and master theses at a large Polish university, seeking to identify discrimination on gender or physical attractiveness. I focus on the gap between the grades awarded by the advisor (who knows the student personally) and the reviewer (who typically does not, so that gender is less salient and beauty is not observable). This provides an excellent control for actual quality of the work, which is often problematic in previous literature. Observations on nearly 15 thousand students are available, of which 2500 also have their physical attractiveness rated and included in my analysis. I can thus check if the advisor-reviewer grade gap depends on student’s gender and beauty, also in interaction with their genders. Overall, there is no evidence of such influence.