Science Fair Topics - what's the rule?

[Anonymous]

So, I was at the Science Fair and saw the range from something a HS student should be able to do vs topics suited to a researcher on the verge of a Nobel Prize.

How on earth did these kids go from AP Bio -> Human Anatomy -> specific Anatomy -> specific Diseases and add Machine Learning to it. This is like 1-2 years after AP Bio or AP Chem.

I googled the titles and sure enough every winning SF title has a publication in a major scientific journal. So it's not their original work and the kids didn't hide it. The staff present it as the kids came up with a Nobel Prize winning approach.

So what's the deal? what's the loop hole that allows this? I thought SF projects were supposed to be a student designs a project and then tries to run it?

[Anonymous]

The issue is that competition results come with a great deal of $ attached, and the rest at least look nice on college applications. The "loop hole" is it's done at home and these are difficult to check. It does involve a sacrifice of learning for prestige, but this is a very prestige-driven area.

(I will say that there are a some kids that do their own work, with minimal assistance, in terms of ideas and guidance, and perhaps lab equipment, from academically-minded parents. But I'm pretty sure a large percentage of entries have relatively limited child input.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The issue is that competition results come with a great deal of $ attached, and the rest at least look nice on college applications. The "loop hole" is it's done at home and these are difficult to check. It does involve a sacrifice of learning for prestige, but this is a very prestige-driven area.

(I will say that there are a some kids that do their own work, with minimal assistance, in terms of ideas and guidance, and perhaps lab equipment, from academically-minded parents. But I'm pretty sure a large percentage of entries have relatively limited child input.)

I know from afar of two Stanford engineers whose father went to my high school, and who tried to cheat off me in 11th grade English, whose high school science projects coincidentally were in the same fields as their parents' grad degrees.

They achieved some national level awards with their projects.

Honestly, knowing the dad as a child, I'm pretty suspicious and it looks like the son has moved up a grift tier. He's a funded founder now of an idea that's a straight rip of another Silicon Valley tech business (going back to a business that tech giant moved out of).

[Anonymous]

Op here - how are the judges, teachers, administrators letting this slide?

Look at the George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award winner last year for International Science Fair: Novel Chemical Doping Strategy to Enhance N-Type Organic Electrochemical Transistors (https://www.societyforscience.org/press-release/regeneron-isef-2024-full-awards/) and a simple Google Scholar Search: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.synthmet.2023.117295 ; First item on the page and the first item already has a stench. The kid did his "novel" approach in 2024 and this paper published in 2023. The parents didn't come up with this.

I'm sure a few are legit and hats off to them. Just looks like the biggest scam and everyone is looking the other way. And its a huge $ prize to win this. Even the authors of the original papers don't say peep?

I do miss the days of a good volcano and which music carrots like?