A new study released this week purports to show that more attractive high-school students tend to make better grades. As if high school weren't hard enough.

Science has already proven that attractive people earn more, get more job interviews, and are generally just treated better by society. But the average among us had at least some consolation that there existed at least one period in life when everyone was equally awkward. Alas, we must say goodbye to that myth. The new paper, which will be published on Friday, compared findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health with GPA data and found that, yes, the beautiful people have a distinct advantage.

The study that the attractiveness data comes from recorded all kinds of data on a set of teenagers during the 1994-95 school year and has followed up with them on a regular basis ever since. (That's right: in the 90s, you could get paid by rating the attractiveness of confidence-compromised adolescents.) Correlating that with the students' high-school GPAs, the researchers found that both male and female who were merely above-average in looks—who were considered to be "standing out from the crowd"—were apparently just liked better by teachers. One glimmer of hope: at least the super-duper-attractive don't have an extra advantage over their merely comely brethren.

So, to recap: pretty people make better grades, which makes them more likely to go to college, which gets them jobs, which keep giving them raises because they're pretty.

Good luck catching up with that.

[image via Getty]