Do students in the front row get better grades? Maybe hard-working students just choose front seats. To check this, teachers of a big physics class at a university chose seats by lottery. Students who started in the back were about six times more likely to fail than students in the front.

But another study with ten years of data found no clear difference. So your seat may matter, but how you listen matters too.

Teachers often say that students who sit at the front do better. But this could simply be because motivated students choose the front. To solve this problem, Perkins and Wieman randomly assigned seats in a large introductory physics class at the University of Colorado, and they switched the front and back halfway through the term.

In the first half, students in the back were about six times more likely to get an F than those in the front. A later study of more than 1,300 psychology students found that grades dropped by about 0.75 percentage points for each row further back. However, a ten-year study of about 1,100 students found no clear effect, so the results may depend on class size and teaching style.

Students in the front row tend to earn higher grades, and the obvious suspicion is that hardworking students simply choose to sit there. To pull apart the effect of the seat from the effect of the student, physicists Perkins and Wieman randomly assigned seats in a large introductory physics course, then swapped the front and back halfway through the semester.

Students who started at the back were roughly six times more likely to get an F, even though the instructors made efforts to engage them. A smaller difference in the other direction showed up for A grades. A study of economics students found that preference and actual position both count. Those who preferred the back did worse wherever they sat, while those pushed forward by a shortage of seats did somewhat better.

Proposed reasons include a clearer view, more eye contact with the instructor and fewer distractions in sight. The physics study, however, covered one course at one university, and the wider evidence is mixed. A ten-year analysis of about 1,100 students found no clear effect of seat location or seat type. Any front-row advantage may be largest in big lecture halls and weaker in classes built around discussion.