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).