Better Looks Means Better Grades?

After browsing CNN for a while I saw a title of an article being "When teachers favor attractive kids" and was immediately alarmed. I could not believe that someone did a study on kids being more successful in school because they were attractive. But, it's true. The full article can be found here but basically the article was written by Pepper Shwartz at University of Washington. She took evidence from different books an studies to show that in many cases it was true: more attractive people were more successful in school and out of school. According to the article,"The difference in GPA and college graduation rates between  youth rated by others  as attractive, versus average in looks, is similar to the  differences in academic achievement between youth raised in two-parent versus single-parent families."

My first thought on this study was who gets to judge what "attractive" really means. The article describes attractive as "good-looking" but that could mean so many different things to different people. I don't think being good looking and not good looking is black and white and I certainly do not think these studies were fair if they did not have a clear definition of what attractive meant. Just because I find someone attractive does not mean someone else will. Although I am sure this study does have some logic to it, I am not completely sold because I do not think two people who did the study get to decide whose attractive.