Markus Kemmelmeier, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada at Reno, set out to ask how political orientation affects a student's college performance. In a study entitled "What's in a Grade? Academic Success and Political Orientation", Kemmelmeier publishes some interesting results.

Previous studies have suggested that conservative students perform slightly worse than other students in certain liberal arts and "social science" courses, such as anthropology. Kemmelmeier's study doesn't overturn this, but it does shed some light on the cause. Rather than take up the commonplace argument that the liberal professors are punishing their conservative students, Kemmelmeier looks to another root cause: the students themselves.