The story refers to the article, the student, in the masculine form. In English, we do not have explicit masculine/feminine forms of adjectives, therefore the article, in this case a student, is a male as the story's author referred to the article as 'him', 'he' and 'his'. I simply do not understand what you are finding so hard about this, other than petty political correctness. QED.
Furthermore, it is totally irrelevant to the story itself!