I was a finalist at the 2017 ISEF and it was quite an experience. A lot of super smart kids there and we all had fun living it up in Los Angeles.
There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to differentiate between these different projects.
It's frustrating that we encourage fraudulent behavior for the college application process. I blame the judges, and college admissions departments.
It orients the entire USA public education system around training sociopathic behavior into teenagers.
We tell young people the best way to get ahead in life is through exaggerating. Then we train them to do it in their college essays and extracurriculars.
Gross.
We need lottery based admissions. Let schools set a minimum test score, and anyone over that goes into lottery for admissions. Kill off essays, extra curriculars, club sports, summer programs, AP tests, Legacy admits, early applications, and let kids have some life again.
Just make tests hard enough so that you wouldn't need lottery
any tests will always be gamed by those with the resources to game them. either ethically (through special tutors and private programs) or unethically (cheating).
Paying tutors is not gaming the system. It is trying to learn effectively. I get that one wants to avoid creating a system where students are forced to spend too much time to learn purely for competition sake with no real practical need, but still.
The core issue is the pyramid shaped system where not being at one of these super places means that you are out of the competition for best work in general.
Having to pay for tutors to have a chance of getting into the best colleges biases the whole system in favour of the wealthy.
Do you want only rich kids going to college?
If you are genuinely smart you will do well enough on qualify for top schools just by studying at school and on your own and relying on your own ability. And even the best and most expensive tutors cannot do that much to improve your scores if you just don't have the aptitude and discipline.
The system now is far more geared towards sending only rich kids to college than any national testing and admissions system would be.
That is not how it works. People having tutors are genuinely smart, have discipline, do well and then get tutor to do even better.
How do kids end up "genuinely smart" or "have discipline"?
If your parents are rich and have are around and can provide excellent schools, nutrition, love and care, pay for extra-curricular activities etc, you are far more likely to end up being "smart" and "have discipline" than someone who grows up in a family where parents are absent, they have to go to an inner city school, they can't afford school trips, instruments, extra-curricular activities, since they have to have a part time job themselves to make ends meet.
My point is, that SO many of the qualities we think that somehow kids got "innately" are actually purely products of luck and circumstance. The ability to "work hard" isn't a gift some are born with and some are born without, it's learned and modeled from our lives, parents, teachers, experiences etc.
If you never have parents that buy you books and encourage you to read, it's doubtful you will end up being "smart"
Plenty of poor kids are genuinely smart and have discipline too.
My point was, people love to imagine world where smart and discipline is mutually exclusive with "parents paying tutor" or other rich person perk. ImAnd if parents pay those, kid must be lazy or stupid.
It is not so. Even super entitled kid can be smart and work hard. If rich entitlement is just another advantage and so is tutor. Poor kids can be as smart as hardworking too, just without additional advantages.
Plsu, some people are not smart or hard working due to genetics. And damm they can be rich too.
There's a diminishing return on the value invested in tutoring where innate ability plays a bigger part.
I've witnessed this first hand via a friend of the family. Their kid didn't have the grades or entrance exam test scores to study what they wanted at university. So the kid got to take a year off after high school and focus entirely on studying for the entrance exams with regular tutoring from various private tutors. And while their test scores absolutely did improve quite a bit by doing this, they didn't improve enough, and they still ended up having to study at a secondary choice anyway.
That argument has nothing to do with whether it is gaming the system. Just like intentionally buying a house on a good school district is not gaming the system.
Any system can and will be cheated, that wasn't the point of neither OP's or mine proposals.
Standardized testing is a good predictor. In my country people are admitted based on standardized testing only (country wide subject exams and sat-like test) or results of university-adjacent "preparation courses" and it works fairly well. The affirmative action is realized directly as a bonus points to your scores based on the background, which reduces the effect of ethical gaming.
At some point a test stops becoming a general aptitude test and starts becoming a "how good are you at taking this test" situation. You get specific prep courses designed just around that one specific test and strategies optimized for that specific test. You start selecting for "elite" rather than "smart."
A merit lottery also keeps everybody from having to waste shitloads of time studying for this one test.
Any test checks how good are you at taking this test. I've not seen evidence that at some complexity level it stops correlating with success in university, have you?
The lottery sortition above the minimum standard (which can still be set quite high) is the solution to preventing a competitive monoculture that a strict "top N scores admitted" policy would make.
Love where your head is at, but assuming we're talking about the united states, we literally just have enough money and resources to subsidize every kid who wants to attend college if we really wanted to.
There are so many measurable long-term benefits to higher education both for the individual as well as the state that it's truly insane (to me any at least) with how unaccessible we've let it become.
We do have many good schools but unlike most places we also have extremely great schools. So while it's pretty easy to fund a good education for everyone, there's always going to be competition for the best.
there's always going to be competition for the best.
Agreed but surely we could come up with a form of competition more fair than something which heavily favors the wealthy and/or familial alumni.
From what I've read, the alternative they've come up with is favoring certain ethnic backgrounds over others. But the courts are currently not favoring that approach. So they may have to go back to looking at grades and test scores.
And the cool second order effect of this, is that all the energy currently invested in this zero sum competition will be redirected into a plan B for kids that don't make the cut.
Which prompts all sorts of interesting ideas like, why don't we have more prestigious universities? Did we decide that there was only so much science that needed done? Or were we trying to put a protective moat round the children of the elites so they didn't need to compete? And then put all our energies into ensuring our kid scraped into the bottom rung of that protected elite and didn't end up on the scrap heap?
why don't we have more prestigious universities?
Depends what you mean by "prestigious universities". If you mean "one of the N best schools in the country" then per definition you cannot create more prestigious universities. If you mean universities capable of offering really high quality education to undergrads, then there are already very many 'unprestigious' universities that are every bit as good as the prestigious ones and in many cases probably a lot better.
I guess what is needed is some sort signal that, while this university doesn't have as many Nobel laureates as Stanford, it is every bit as good at teaching undergraduate physics. I wish there was a university ranking that only focused on the quality of the undergraduate teaching and education, but I have no idea how that would be done.
why don't we have more prestigious universities?
Legacy families need prestigious universities to be rare and exclusive so that them having gone there increases in value. They already know that their kids will get in so making top universities more exclusive only has benefits for them.
I recommend some type of testing. Even subject specific.
And for most desirable institutions just outright auction for certain amount of spots. Let the rich bid for spot and the money spend to subsidise others.
"Let the rich bid for spot and the money spend to subsidise others."
this is called international students
This feels fair. I would personally be totally in favor of nationalizing college admissions along such lines. Every school is given a fixed number of admits/waitlists and these are then allocated by lottery based upon such rudimentary qualifications. The federal government could easily force the issue by tying federal funds to a unified national admission scheme (They did this back in the 60's to eliminate men's colleges).
That's why admissions should be tests-only. No interviews, no personality scores, no intentional shaping of the leadership class.
That's not only scientific fraud, it's real felony fraud.
Maybe community service equivalent to 50,000.00 at federal minimum wage would sort him out.
The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.
For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
17 year olds are of course fully responsible for their own academic claims and creations. You would get expelled from many high schools for much smaller cases of plagiarism.
Do you really get expelled from high school in the USA? Isn't that basically mandatory education? And for plagiarism?
I'd see some evidence.
I don't know, my anecdotes would be from a private school in Europe where a family member is a teacher. They take plagiarism seriously, but also can expel students a lot easier than public schools can.
The point being is that plagiarism at a known private school that you pay good money for and hope to rely on, is something you will give much more consideration than sending work to a science fair to see if it will stick to a wall or not.
Neither are particularly good behaviors, but as a "computer guy" I think your public-facing API (science fair admissions) should validate its inputs. There are people out there who send know malicious requests to endpoints, you know.
Instead of blaming an underage student I'd reevaluate all of their prior nominations. Chances of dragons being there.
I totally agree that the fair failed badly at validating the submissions.
The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.
This is what I disagree with. A 17 year old is not an innocent child that mustn't be blamed. At this age (and already earlier too) there has to be real consequences for plagiarism, proportionate to the case.
Plagiarize coursework? Fail the course. Cheat in final exams? Fail the exams and retake the year. And so on.
So let him fail the science fair and probably be banned from entering this science fair and probably other ones if they're federated.
If that's not his first participation then the previous ones should also be reevaluated.
But that doesn't have much point since he's growing out of them already. And I don't think it's fair to pursue him further (other than existing bad publicity) since people do stupid things all the time and the idea of limited liability exists for a reason.
Big difference between public and private schools. Getting expelled from a public school is pretty hard, you basically have to do something seriously illegal involving guns and/or drugs. Getting expelled from a private school is an entirely different thing. They can expel you for a lot of things, and basically anything that makes the school look bad in the eyes of prospective future 'customers' is high on that list. Especially among more prestigious schools.
The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.
If I,as a child, stole 50k USD, surely i would get thrown into the jail, or juvie.
For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
There's difference between remixing and outright stealing with intent to deceive, for monetary gain.
Even more so when one's under university tutelage, and comes from well off family - where 50k USD matters way less.
This case only became severe because they chose to award these money to compilated work with no attribution. If they didn't reward this specific work it would be a non-issue. So by induction blame lies on the offering part.
Doing subpar work is not stealing. Come on, we've been through "intellectual property" already and now this.
you are doing some heavy mental gymnastics right now. What he did was a crime, reward or not, and he should be old enough to understand why that was immoral and possible consequences of it.
aren't you affiliated with him somehow?
What he did was a crime
No! It wasn't. I'll bet no court will agree with you.
Next question.
Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
Yeah, in the arts maybe, but not in the sciences.
You have enough life experience to know the difference. Do teens? Are you confident in that? Are you a child psychologist? Do you have any? How many papers did you publish?
I'm only saying you don't excuse it because they are teens.
If his project was just shoddy scientifically, that wouldn't be an issue. I'm sure 90% of the projects are like that. He committed deliberate fraud, stealing other people's work (including past kid winners!), and won 50k for it. That's not "throwing something together" it's deliberate cheating.
If they've already awarded him these $50k, congratulations and they should probably close the project down. They've failed basic validation of inputs before transferring $50k to a fradulent competitor.
You do not fail that hard by accident. It speaks of prolonged negligence and as I've said elsewhere, their whole portfolio needs to be rechecked.
As for research ethics, not everybody is a researcher and thus has the same ethic. For me the guys who get bogus computer-generated articles through reviews and into journals are genius, even though people with research background may see that as a violation. Tough life.
The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.
I am surprised that the organizers did not catch this, though I don't know enough to know how much time the organizers had.
For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
For kids, in general, if one kid makes a claim ("I made this," or "This game cartridge is mine") that turns out to be false, there is generally some sort of comeuppance. That could be as simple as the kid losing respect within their peer group, or it could be as serious as parents being informed about the kid commiting a petty crime.
This is important, because it instills society's values (such as they are) in the child. For example, what if kid A steals a game cartridge from kid B, and then kid B retaliates by shooting and killing kid A? That response is generally frowned upon, in most parts of the world.
In my opinion, it would be fine if "the child" was presenting a poster showing the current state of research in microbial recycling of plastics. That's a cool thing for a high school senior or college freshman to do. But to take existing research (stealing), manipulate images (lying), and cast it as their own work (stealing and lying), on a national stage, that requires an appropriate comeuppance.
My point, if you can't get adult professionals with wages admit they fk'd up, there's zero and even negative expectations of unpaid teenager contestants.
And that's what I am seeing happening right now.
You have unacceptable amount of leniency towards organizers, in "don't know how much time did they have". They should've had enough to scrutinize their short list. Perhaps it all looks like the winning submission.
One of the details that strike me is that the cheater comes from a fairly wealthy background and has no need for that prize money at all. They have much more to lose than gain and this doesn’t seem rational at all.
They don’t need the money. They want to win so they can get into college.
Is college that important when you’re already rich af? There are other channels to get in without risking reputational ruin.
The boy cones from an Indian background which is highly competitive and looks down on it's own people if they are not "successful" career wise
He comes from a rich caste family, which is on the opposite side in regards to "introspection and external perception".
Indian society is unlike any other and cannot be simplified, even within the individual castes.
Of course I do not know this individual and their mindset concerning "motivations", but I find it very unlikely that these "mistakes" are due to entrenched group morays shared among poor/dalit castes.
Is college that important when you’re already rich af?
A lot of people care about prestige and reputation at least as much as they care about money, especially people who have money. For many people being rich isn't enough, they also have to be seen as smart and successful.
More important than ever. Rich and your kids didn't get into the Ivy you were graduated from? Shameful.
without risking reputational ruin
Feels a bit like, "Hope this impresses the judges ... but not too much."
Like I imagine the way card counters in Vegas must feel. I want to win, but not so much I attract the attention of the pit bosses.
Googling his name brings up this article as the third result. Someone in whatever college he has been accepted to will surely discover and spread rumors, which he can’t really defend against because all the evidence supports that he did it. If he tries to publish anything, people will see his name and immediately question its legitimacy. If he gets an offer and the employer finds out they may rescind it because they can’t trust him.
Maybe he won’t outright get his admission rescinded, but I can’t see how a prestigious college is worth more than an intact reputation (I’m sure that without this award he still would’ve been accepted to a great community college at worst, and with his research internship assuming good AP scores, he may have even got into his top choice).
Sure. The gist of what you write is true. Being caught cheating harms his future prospects.
You are thinking that now because he was already caught. But when he decided to cheat he didn’t know he will be caught. Probably he either estimated the chanches of him it wrong. Thinking perhaps that he will do a better job with the cheating, or that nobody looks that hard. Or he assumed lower consequences. Perhaps assuming if they catch him they just won’t give him the award, as opposed to making a big deal out of it.
If the chance of getting caught is low enough the expected value of cheating is positive.
It's for university admissions. It's not that surprising. There's a lot of fraud in admissions. I've met students who have given TED talks on subjects they have no idea about, written science books with fake reviews on Amazon, etc. all for admissions.
There are a lot of firms specializing in designing bullshit extracurricular activities for rich snobs. As long as you’re willing to pay it’s not hard to have UN photo ops, TED talks like you said, philanthropy in Africa, etc. under your belt, all low risk activities that are usually good enough for Ivy League. It’s interesting this guy chose to fake one of the few things people might actually bother to scrutinize. He’s probably looking further than college, though.
Wasn't there a recent scandal, about celebrities gaming the system to get their kids admitted to top-tier colleges?
I seem to remember folks getting jailed/fired/fined for that.
Science fairs always have hints of fraud around them. Many of the children putting out incredibly advanced research, beyond their capacity, are benefiting from their parents’ expertise, or friends of family, or access to labs, and such. It’s not talked about much but has been an issue for decades.
As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones. It’s weird to see tweets referring to participants as the “Indian guy” and “Chinese guy”. Or is that just me?
Definitely racial tones. Asian countries are frequently accused of copying, cheating, and stealing intellectual property from others, so it matches what people assume about members of those races.
I think this comes down to "face culture" where its "better" to lie and be caught than be forthright from the beginning.
The people used to / raised in face cultures think this is normal and acceptable behavior (because: hey everyone else is doing this I should too - If I don't I will fall behind), whereas those from more "honest" cultures tend to despise the behaviour as it makes work less trustworthy and tends to give an unfair advantage. Notice how the reason for and against doing this is the same: unfairness.
Face cultures tend to embrace systemic unfairness as "fair" whereas non face cultures tend to call it as it is. What's interesting is that countries "with a face culture" tend to have higher levels of corruption and unfair business practices but also much higher levels of societal cohesion and trust. In other words, the more likely you are to save face the less likely you are to live in a democracy. And the less likely you are to trust institutions/organisations the more likely that they are trustworthy.
There are plenty of examples in the recent past of high social trust countries without a face culture.
I know these guys were US kids, but when I was at university, it did seem that foreign students from large population and highly competitive countries seemed to not have the same focus on honesty. I mean, I saw US kids cheating, but some of the foreign students would actually laugh at you for not cheating. I just took it as a difference in culture. The same way what would be considered a "bribe" in the US would just be "doing business" in some other cultures.
I don't know if it's still the case, but decades ago when I was at ISEF (and somewhat fewer years ago when I judged...) the judges would get to talk to the students.
I judged at some robotics competitions where we interviewed the students. It was usually immediately apparent if the student had not done the work, and as a result they would not receive an award.
I think that's the only way to do it. The student must be able to describe the work they did. A fraudster might still get through with sufficient coaching.
Many of the children putting out incredibly advanced research, beyond their capacity, are benefiting from their parents’ expertise, or friends of family, or access to labs, and such.
Do we have a solution for this, and do we need a solution? Lets go nuts, lets go hyperbolic: should we ban kids from learning from their parents?
they aren't necessarily learning anything from their parents. their parents are doing most of the work.
Or is that just me?
Click around on Karlstack some more.
It probably does. For every solid guy from Indian background who was living in the USA that I worked with, there were always at least 5 horror stories involving e.g. some back office tasks that involved one of 3000+ people working in India (at a previous company of > 30k total employees). It's not fair to the guys in the USA for sure.
Agree with the last bit. This is the perfect way to start racially stereotyping.
For the first bit, unfortunately that's hard to control and is actually talked about quite a bit (speaking as a HS student). I would be interested in alternative suggestions to limit these advantages, but I don't think it's realistically possible.
As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones.
Noticed that as well. I feel like it has unfortunately become somewhat socially acceptable to be slightly racist against Indians and Chinese people due to a mix of politics and demographics in tech.
Everyone makes mistakes — Lord knows I did plenty of stupid, immoral things when I was 17 — and there is always the opportunity for growth and redemption.
when did the definition of 'mistake' change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.
i don't mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn't be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he's a teenager, but let's not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.
The definition of mistake has always included actions done on purpose. Consider the sentences:
Getting on that Boeing jet was a huge mistake.
The worst mistake I ever made was voting for Trump.
Having an intern give him a blowjob was the biggest mistake of Clinton's career.
In all of those cases the action was done on purpose. You are confusing the definition of mistake with the phrase "by mistake", i.e. "I ran rm -rf by mistake", which means unintentionally.
You are confusing mens rea and actus rea.
I think it features in the song “we are the champions,” so before 1977. I think “I’ve made mistakes/people make mistakes” has been used to euphemistically describe a lapse of judgement for a really long time.
Or even better, the passive form, "mistakes have been made" :)
We generally consider anyone under 18 now to basically not have capacity to make decisions.
Therefore anything they do that is bad is a mistake.
Most mistakes aren’t accidents, plenty of accidents aren’t mistakes.
Those stupid, immoral things that the author did at 17 were also done on purpose. The mistake is in the reasoning that led to the decision to do the action.
Pai's mistake was _deciding_ to commit research fraud, and then doing it.
A mistake is not exclusive to actions, it encompass judgement as well. Misguided actions start from a misguided judgement.
when did the definition of 'mistake' change to encompass actions done on purpose?
It didn't change, it's always been that way.
From Google search: > an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong. > Example: "coming here was a mistake"
I believe you're confusing "mistake" with "accident".
In reading this, I am reminded of a YouTube video by CGP Grey about how anger is more viral than any other emotional reaction online, including love. But then I think, isn't this one of those times where at least some level of annoyance is justified?
Except, there's nothing I can do about it. Does making more people aware, that can't do anything about it, improve the situation? Or is awareness pointless because of how transient it is?
And, what if the next great filter isn't great, but a series of smaller exponential filters pulled into a tight timeframe by the advancement of technology?
I probably just need more sleep.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to dishonest behavior
If you or someone you know was in the science fair, or you were involved with it somehow. Maybe if you users just really invested in science fairs, those are all reasons to be angry. But if you are like most, this has no impact whatsoever on you or your life. At most this should provoke a shrug, a head shake, and a “that’s not right, I hope they do something.” From the vast majority of people.
I think it’s fine to be angry at the world when frauds are rewarded and celebrated. It’s not a victimless crime, and if you wish for the world to be a meritocracy, it feels like a slap in the face.
But if you are like most, this has no impact whatsoever on you or your life.
Uh, how do you so confidently say this? Do you have a crystal ball that can see into the future? You have no idea what the honest researchers might've gone on to accomplish in the future as a result of winning these competitions. One of them might literally change the world (including your life) for the better if they don't get discouraged along the way through witnessing fraudsters win like this. That's literally the point of these competitions -- to increase the chances of someone making a world-changing discovery or invention down the road. You should absolutely be angry if some of the brightest minds that could solve your current problems are actively being turned away from doing so.
The anger is appropriate for the circumstance, maybe. Seeking out things to make you angry (aka social media in general) is not healthy.
There is a reason to increase awareness - to put pressure on Society for Science to take action. So far they still have not made a public statement, have disabled their YouTube comments etc, and seem to just be waiting for this all to blow over.
They are taking action - the google doc has been updated to show this. They aren't taking PUBLIC action and I suspect won't make a PUBLIC statement until the investigation is over.
How about you give them some time to go through the process?
Very naive take. They have only responded to some journalist who pressured them so that it wouldn't become a news story and are claiming they're investigating. But then go on to post on Youtube, share the press release with media outlets, etc. They're clearly waiting for attention to die down without having to get any public scrutiny for this big fuck up, b/c useful idiots like you will say "they're doing something!!"
Not anger, justice.
Most of us crave justice porn, and only when I am feeling in my most generous, zen-like mood can I find fault in that.
I wrote an earlier reply to someone about how all I learned from the several mandatory ethics courses is that the people who cheat tend to be winners even after their punishment, if any.
I bet that even after all this, that kid will still be better off having cheated than not.
I am curious, what is the definition of winners here? Do they make more money or do they invent more successful products/ideas or is it something else?
Money, social acceptance, access to desirable partners, positions of prestige, etc. All the nice things we wrestle over in life.
Anything you compete for except the “he was a good man” phrasing in obituaries, the cheaters usually get to have. Even if caught.
Not cheating outside of a few really heinous crimes such as murder (killing your science fair opponent wouldn’t be a winning strategy if caught) is an altruistic action.
Not cheating... is an altruistic action.
Wow that's dark.
Not cheating outside of a few really heinous crimes such as murder (killing your science fair opponent wouldn’t be a winning strategy if caught) is an altruistic action.
I can only imagine someone trying to justify cheating would say that.
Cheating on your spouse is okay? Not cheating on your spouse altruistic? That concept is alien to me. I don't understand someone having no self-respect or being completely numb to how others feel. I know some exist, but I can't comprehend.
If there's "winning" in life it's through living a good and happy life. Some time past our teenage years I think all but the most self-adsorbed people realize that being kind and respectful to others also contributes to our own happiness.
I had an ethics (philosophy) course in uni and I don't think _ethos_ is about winning.
It isn't. But that is what makes it irrelevant to the target audience.
Indeed - last I checked, Kaavya Viswanathan was doing just fine. Even had a stint at white-shoe law firm.
When I was 16 I did a project on whether plants could be used to remove heavy metals from soil. I don’t know why I did this but I did a nitrate test on the plants (because I had been putting lead nitrate into the soil) and drew the conclusion that it must’ve worked.
About 2 weeks before the city science fair I realized my error (none of my teachers had said anything).
So in an attempt to lose, I made my backboard as bad as possible. I didn’t use scissors or glue, I just tore the paper and used masking tape.
Long story short, I have no idea how, but despite my best efforts, I won the city science fair including an HP-48 graphing calculator and a trip to the state science fair.
At the state science fair my backboard (you had to use the same one as the city contest) was mocked by much more studious 8-year olds. I found out that teachers weren’t allowed in the exhibition hall so I just abandoned my space and went to the beach.
I did not win the state science fair.
why would you try to lose instead of just writing about the null hypothesis? why even make a submission?
I am not sure it shows the null hypothesis either, unless I am missing something because it was not chance or sampling error.
I was 16 and didn’t want to do any more work. My school was making me submit my project.
In hindsight, obviously there was a lot I could’ve done differently.
Also, I didn’t know what a null hypothesis was then. TBH I still don’t!
Did you tell the judge or could you get a sense of what they thought?
I probably talked to 3 or 4 judges and explained to all of them exactly what I did and never lied. But I also wasn’t forthcoming about the error. I just explained the experiment and the result. None of them asked any questions that I couldn’t answer.
I remember I was sitting next to a girl who had an amazing project. At the end of the day they called her name for 2nd place and I remember thinking, “Wow, who beat her?!” And then they call my name…
I thought it was either all a mistake or that maybe the judges thought I was mentally challenged on account of my backboard and it was a pity situation? In hindsight, perhaps an emperor has no clothes situation where everybody sees the error but nobody wants to be the first one to call it out?
I'm baffled by the idea of making science competition with so much prize money for teenagers. For me it's antithetic with the goal of scientific research and can only fail in the long term. As a side note, the real responsible here is not the tennagers, but the organizers that didn't manage to catch a fraud so obvious
most of these teenagers already come from upper middle class (professional parents) backgrounds, they don't need the money, they know that winning it is a guaranteed admission to MIT or Harvard. Getting admitted to top schools today is an order of magnitude tougher than it was even 10 years ago.
Maybe it's different in the US but everywhere else in the world 50K is a really huge amount of money for everyone but the 0.1% richest.But anyway if as you same it's also a ticket for the best schools, the rewards is still huge beside the money. I would even say it's even worse like that, because attending the best school give so many opportunities
The amount of prize money shocked me too, I put it down to a culture I don't understand.
See also $50,000 prize money for what's called a "Spelling Bee": Asking children to spell words correctly.
I feel so far removed from understanding that culture that I feel like I can't criticize it.
My kids attended the same high school district that this student's school, Canyon Crest Academy (CCA), is part of. My youngest has friends that attended CCA and I asked him once why he didn't want to attend (it's an open school district) -- his reply is "all they do is study for AP tests." So I'm thinking there might be other pressures (i.e. parental) to perform, and this student may have responded in a desperate fashion.
Raising my kids in the Bay Area, I certainly am aware of what I call unhealthy competitiveness in even the public schools.
If you think this is an unfortunate way to raise a child — in that kind of overly competitive environment – then there is a lot of blame to go around. The difficulty of getting into a UC school being an obvious place to start.
The difficulty of getting into a UC school being an obvious place to start.
its obvious that there is competition to get to top school. So, it is question of setting expectation to get there and not necessary difficulty (which is natural and given)
There's a good book, Punished By Rewards.
Borrowed - thanks!
There's more to it, but I found the advice "Praise effort, not results" to incredibly useful.
These actions, while serious, should not define Pai’s entire life
Too late for that. Very late. Unluckily his mind is set on pretending too much. Which is ubiquitous and actually encouraged in life to a great degree (not like this should be an excuse for adapting).
What is not late is to seek a different career in life. Be an influencer, praised youtuber or a political adviser perhaps, but the science world needs much different mindset. His reputation is annihilated by himself beyond repair anyway. The useful side of the story: be it a learning experience for the others.
I wish reality were closer to how you see it, but there are people who do far worse to their reputation, but continue to have careers. In the US a doctor can tell their patients that the diseases they have are caused by demon sperm and that alien technology is in their medications/treatments and that doctor still gets to keep their practice/medical license. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Immanuel) Police officers can lie, steal, rape, or murder forcing them to resign or causing them to get fired, but they have no problems getting another job as a police officer the next county over (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fired-cops-routinel...). Scientists can repeatedly fabricate evidence for corporations and have long careers doing so. The scientists hired by the tobacco industry to lie are also used by the oil industry and are deciding what chemicals are safe to put in our food (https://publicintegrity.org/politics/food-safety-scientists-...)
This guy probably has a long and profitable career as a scientist ahead of him.
Right. The way the science community carry out their activity is increasingly shameful, I was thinking about an idealistic situation still, that is right.
He will definitely have a fruitful career in a science leadership position, possibly not only in China.
Scary examples. Scary. It is increasinlgy benefitial to live life with a great deal of ignorance just to feel worthwhile getting out of the bed in the morning and put one tiny straw into the big haystack of the humanity, while others put it on fire all the time for their own personal warmth.
Isn't this equally embarrassing for the people that decided to award him? I mean just looking at those images or even imagining the sort of research and equipment that would take to achieve something like this, shouldn't have raised red flags easily?
Sure, but it happens all the time with "professional" science too. This guy did nothing that isn't seen every day in the literature.
The reason these people didn't check the claims is because they have an extremely strong culture of never checking any claims. If they did they might discover the claims were false, and then they might feel obliged to attack a colleague who realistically will be protected by their institution, and who might be a peer reviewer or even colleague in future. So, ignorance is bliss.
Consider the distribution of the entered projects. Due to the selection process (think evolution-style selection rather than "human judging" selection), all the projects, whether purely-student-driven, student-driven with just a dash of parental help, half-and-half, and the student basically along for the ride as the parent runs a project, are in one big pile. Is there going to be a bright, sharp dividing line? Especially in light of the fact that quality is only going to be loosely correlated with external help?
Perhaps this is an unpopular call but my personal opinion is that the whole idea of a "national scale" science project contest is irredeemably flawed and the correct answer is simply to discard it. It is a common flaw in thinking, often expressed by many commenters zealous to "correct" other people, that if you can't draw a bright sharp unarguable line between the various elements of a group of some sort that you can't claim the group "exists". This is nonsense; almost every practical grouping scheme will always have borderline cases or exceptions. But there does need to be some sort of actual grouping, or some sort of relatively objective way to sort and categorize the elements, that is accessible to the sorter. In this case, while from the objective divine perspective maybe we could create an objective standard for who got "too much help" to be qualified, there is no conceivable world in which the contest judges could ever get sufficiently accurate information to be presented with anything other than a very smooth gradation that they simply will have no handle to make a correct decision with. So the incentives will always be to get as much help as possible and then have human-intelligent agents doing their best to fool the human-intelligent judges, and that's just a hopeless situation.
Of course, the contest will not be shut down. But what can happen and what may well happen is that it will get more and more embroiled in controversy each year as the game-theoretic local optimum approach for the contestants each year becomes more and more to accuse their competition of being "too helped" and thus take out the competition until it is simply a farce. This is the worst game-theory case for cooperation; very limited repetition of plays by any given participant, most likely one, so no reason to care about the integrity of the contest for next year when they won't even be participating most likely.
Sounds like someone is a member of the Dan Ariely school of science. There might be a professorship at Duke in his future.
Home hellinga also at duke!
Source, "Open Letter to Regeneron ISEF": https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e4vjzp6JgClCFXkbNOweXZno...
Wow, the entire project was basically copy pasted from other work.
What gets me, is there are clear scientific errors (talking about RNA fragments but should have been protein fragments).
This would have been immediately caught by someone with a basic knowledge of the field.
How do they judge the projects if not having subject matter experts closely review them and the results?
Many, many years ago I participated in ISEF, so this is personally disappointing to me. I'll echo some of the sibling comments about the difference between kids who did the project alone versus parents/lab mentors who ... ahem ... contributed significantly to the project. In contrast, my project was entirely self-made and therefore not very impressive, but it had some gimmicks in how I presented it which managed to impress judges at the school and regional levels, enough to send me to ISEF.
ISEF was an amazing experience, especially as a kid from a school that was nothing special. Our school was so excited that they hired a public speaking specialist to work with me to prepare. Looking back, that training in public speaking directly contributed to many successes in my career decades down the line. Plus the experience of going to ISEF still brings back positive memories. I never felt like I belonged - there were some amazingly smart kids there - but the social camaraderie and the ability to meet kids that thought it was cool to be smart was eye opening.
As far as "making mistakes when you're 17" - yeah, I made mistakes then too, but I certainly paid the price for them. Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify, if these allegations can be proven. There should be serious consequences for this.
Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify
To earn $55,000...
We shouldn't internationally name and shame 17 year olds on HN.
Their name is already widespread online. A niche forum linking to an article that mentions it will hardly make an impact.
Besides, this behavior deserves shaming, revoking of their prize, and maybe even legal repercussions. A 17 year old is practically an adult in many jurisdictions, and if they're doing this at that age, they will only continue to commit fraud later. Ethics should be learned early on in life, and a 17 year old should know better. Let this be a lesson.
I will take the liberty to expreas my most profound cynicism. Didn't Google fake some of its AI showcases recently? Didn't Apple fake stuff about their iPhone on some presentation? I believe this goes beyond a young person "mistake". And no. It's not just to the universities. There are plenty of institutions involved. There are commercial successes from technology corporations to take inspiration from. The lack of consequences stems from a judicial power that's made in an extreme conservative set of rules. So, everything is on fire. Or should be. And don't get me started on research journals and editorials...
you can start with politicians who win the race using their lying skills and who decide our policies and future.
Sadly he actually has a big chance to survive and strive in today's science community, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis.
The elephant in the room is that 17 years old should not be writing long scientific articles witha lot of supporting material. They are not paid for that and they are expected to study first.
We should definitely expect to see short, brilliant discoveries from teenagers when they notice a gem in a heap of data adults discarded.
But not that kind of bureaqucratic nightmare style scientific papers where the result is attained mostly through prespiration, not inspiration. 100% great for already learned and paid adults, being fraud or exploitation of adolescents.
This is pretty similar to some fraud in professional science that's more common than it should be. A few people have started to make it a hobby to detect copy-and-pasted and altered images in published research:
Fabrication discovered in prominent Alzheimer's research: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
"Sleuths" uncovering fraud and getting retractions for thousands of papers: https://apnews.com/article/danafarber-cancer-scandal-harvard... and https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-sharp-eyed-... and https://retractionwatch.com/2022/07/22/papers-in-croce-case-...
So I'm dismayed but not surprised that the incentives driving fraud in research science are trickling down into pre-college science fairs. A cynical person might conclude that we're just training the next generation of scientists to be better at fraud.
Reading this article and comments it seems that cheating is just as common in the Tour de France as the Regeneron.
Hope he ends up in Tarkington College.
'What's the hurry, son?'
The image boxed in red above is a falsified image taken from online, and has had mirroring performed in the hopes that no one would notice.
This probably won't happen in the future... because future competitors will learn from this mistake and know to run their image generation through AI so that their images are "novel"...
Don't mentors have to sign off along the way? That part I don't get...
Can someone explain this? Is it plausible the mentors genuinely had no idea?
Said with kindness and discretion.
Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities. It has been for decades. I know firsthand that many Chinese-born parents don't even view it as at all wrong.
Unfortunately, many cultures don't see honesty as a value on its own. In Polish there's a word "frajer" which is an offensive term for someone who got cheated or didn't take advantage of a situation. The logic is that, if the society as a whole is dishonest, then it doesn't make sense to be a martyr recognized by no-one, and it's better to make sure you take care of yourself first.
Fun fact: that's actually a Yiddish word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frajer
English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.
Yiddish is a German language.
Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.
What tokai said was OK: English is also classified as a Germanic language even though it includes a lot of French words, not to mention Hindi etc.
For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.
I think calling something a Germanic language is a bit different to calling it a German language.
I completely agree with your point about a "Germanic language" but I disagree about "a German language".
It developed from High German with elements of Aramaic and Hebrew, in the area we would now call west Germany. The only way it's not a German language is if you deny the historic and linguistic roots of the language.
It did not develop exclusively from high German, as I wrote before and it was geographically widespread enough for clear Eastern vs Western dialects to emerge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_dialects#Eastern_Yiddi...
Rather than existing "in the area we would now call west Germany" as you would like to believe for some reason. Eastern Yiddish in particular is much more than "a German language" (unless you want to call Polish a German language as well).
Similar word also exists in standard German, where it originally meant "f*cker" but now just means a man who buys services from a prostitute.
Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then
No it more likely comes from archaic "freien", which still is used for "to marry" but used to mean something slightly different ;)
They still use a variant of that word in Dutch: vrijen. With the old meaning.. ;)
The even older meaning is "courter".
Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.
The word is widely used in Russian as well.
Unfortunately very similar to Uruguay, where I grew up. One of the many reasons I haven't lived there for a while now :(
To pile on top: also pretty similar to Brazilian culture where following the rules will be looked down as being stupid (since everyone else isn't abiding by them, you doing it is considered as self-handicapping).
One of my least favourite features of Brazil and definitely in the top 3 reasons why I left the country more than a decade ago.
In Czech Republic, under communism, they used to say:
Reminds me about covid time math competition. It had to be taken online. Usually maximum score can be reached by less than a dozen of students, but when competition was online there were over 3000 math geniuses
https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/koronawirus-gigantyczne-rozb...
This has been a meme/running gag in countless sitcoms and Sunday morning newspaper comic strips for as long as I can remember. Not the Asian community part, just the 'parents actually doing the work' part. The joke is typically about overly competitive middle class suburban fathers juxtaposed against their children who have better things to do than care about dorky school projects.
The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars.
Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.
As featured in South Park episode "Pinewood Derby" [1] [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Derby_(South_Park)
[2] https://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/oki0th/south-park-...
Also a (not south park) movie! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Derby
Do you need to have a child to get in on the parents segment of your cub scout's pinewood derby race? Asking for a friend.
I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)
If you wanted to organize some competitions in your city, the track I saw would be easy to build. You might want to design it to break down for storage in someone's garage, and to fit in the back of a couple SUVs. Maybe get city approval to host events as a block party or at a park. Or pre-arrange to donate it to a parish that hosts Scouts and has room to store it and occasionally set it up in their school gym or coffee&donuts hall.
Today, you also have more RC vehicle competitions, and (over-media-ified) generations of battling homebrew robots.
That's frankly an amazing way to stem the number of enthusiastic parents doing their kid's projects. I wouldn't have thought of it.
due to growing up in cut throat dog eat dog culture, a lot of people from asia don't really teach their kids about ethics and morality even whilst living in western societies, many times they encourage the opposite.
Yep and this is a big problem. Because while the fraud in this article was clear cut… in many other cases there can be significant misrepresentation about the student’s actual novel contributions.
We are family friends with a Chinese national who did pretty well in this year's ISEF. They spent last summer back in mainland China at a private science fair camp where they prepped and prebuilt most of their project for the year. They are very bright, did a ton of real work, but had a large paid team behind them supporting and helping. They almost could have professional and amateur divisions at this point.
Many many years ago I participated in a national history competition and went to nationals. The participants were almost entirely white, and there was absolutely this "well its obvious the parents didi this" thing there too.
Honestly, in my country (the Netherlands) this whole attitude changed within 1 generation. My parents left met largely alone with my school stuff. Now I hear all my friends complaining that their kid's school "is so much work" for them.
Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."
It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.
My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?
Unless something drastically changed in the education system the last ten years, I wonder where all that perceived workload is coming from.
Because 10 years back, the homework load, as expressed by the post high-school students I was hanging around with, was significantly lower than in some other European countries.
Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. That's some serious amount of time, putting pressure on everything else.
I was always told: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of leisure. Sure, you have eating and commuting etc. But people nowadays have to take those 5+ hours attention they're giving away from somewhere.
I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.
It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.
Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?
And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?
And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books?
Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible.
Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it.
Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia.
Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media.
It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.
Sure, my son enjoys high quality content like "Life on our planet", but he also has a Smartphone, which is much more addictive than a TV with, indeed, mediocre content. Moreover, all my friends were outside, on the streets, in the forest. Not so much right now.
There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.
Have you seen what children are doing on their phones? It's not sophisticated discourse on all human knowledge or reading informative articles. It's digital heroin, ads and rage content.
That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win.
TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.
Come off it. These kids aren't spending that time reading Wikipedia, they're on social media platforms that optimize for engagement and gambling apps disguised as video games.
In Europe? At least around here, in post-Soviet states, 10 years ago is about the time the first generation of people, who experienced the "good school -> good university -> good job" phenomenon on themselves, had kids reaching school age. The rat race is barely picking up steam over here; we're lagging a couple decades of social "progress" compared to our Western counterparts.
At least in North America, this has massively changed within a generation. By a lot. Virtually all of my social circle got help at a young age to buy big houses from their parents. Parents support kids for much longer. Kids live with their parents much longer.
So yeah, the parents are now always there for people my age (mid 20s).
Damn, none of my friends can even afford a house now, and there's definitely no parental help with _purchasing a home_. That's such an insanely large amount of money. Parents might help with kids from time to time but monetary assistance ended the moment we first graduated.
Your attitude will change as soon as you have an obviously smart pre-adolescent or adolescent kid, going through puberty and other hard times that come before and after, and deciding to viscerally reject school and study, as proxy for other hard upsetting things they have to deal with as you become an adult.
You ready to let them mess up their future, in the name of not being called an helicopter parent?
I remember when I did science fair a long time ago and this was still true. I managed to get a few levels to the state science fair, but that was as far as I ever got. It was all about the best humidity conditions for popping popcorn with the fewest un-popped kernels and maximum volume.
Some of the other projects that I saw were just amazing. Even if the parents didn't help many of the top projects involved thousands of dollars of equipment that most students had no access to.
And no, other than maybe $100 from my parents, they didn't help at all.
Understanding the effect of humidity on popcorn making sounds like a fascinating research project. Also one that I can honestly imagine a high school student undertaking. I would like to know how you controlled humidity, what your popcorn making apparatus was, what conclusions you drew, can it really make my popcorn better, so many questions.
It seems so sad that we're taking projects that would be real fun---like yours---and comparing them to projects that clearly required massive amounts of infrastructure and external expertise. Now, again, both kinds of projects have their place: one to let students do genuine science, and the other for students to get an exposure to university research labs.
Why again are we turning science fairs into competitions and handing out awards and using them to filter college admissions? How many science fair entries report on failed experiments or admit that they didn't obtain statistically significant results? The whole thing reeks of misplaced incentives.
Nobody would enter the science fair if it didn’t provide a benefit to winning.
Aww shucks, thank you for the kind words.
I'd count out little dixie cups of 100 popcorn kernels each. Then I would weigh them and put them all in the laundry room, where the humidity was pretty constant for different time periods over a few months. I took another set of batches and heated them up in the oven for different periods of time. Then re-weigh to see how much moisture was lost from the kernels. Seeing that the amount of unpopped kernels and volume was pretty consistent between the fast drying and slow drying allowed me to predict what it might be like for years old popcorn by really drying out the kernels. I also did some batches in a high humidity environment using a box with a humidifier and seeing the weight gain from the moisture.
Everything was popped in an air popper to give everything that was going to pop the time to pop. Then count the unpopped kernels!
The overall conclusion is popcorn is probably good for up to a year, and you can do a lot better than the microwave bags if you buy loose popcorn. Generally more moisture helped, but there was a sweet spot range where there's enough moisture to have the steam make it pop big and open, but too much humidity made the casing soft and it would have just a kernel that was cracked but didn't pop.
The hardest part was coming up with a precision scale that could do two digits of precision. Basically everyone that used them then were either drug dealers or people who bought actual lab equipment.
Thank you for coming to my popcorn ted talk.
Oh and I forgot, this was when I was in 5th grade. Good times.
It may also manifest in microwaves which "Popcorn" settings (well, when it's not a fraudulent feature) where monitoring moisture changes can help detect when a bad is done. (The fall-off in popping noises being another metric.)
I never judged ISEF, but it was highly predictable that the kids with university mentorship made it from my circuit to there. Felt really unfair to the smart self-motivated kids who didn’t have connections. IMO the fairs should take a much harder stance on this, as it defeats the spirit of such competitions.
People with connections have a leg up, but it's really not that hard to do it yourself. My parents were not researchers, we did not have connections, but I literally could emailed prof after prof showing my enthusiasm & knowledge I had gained already from my research until one decided to take a chance on me. I ended up publishing research with that connection I built which probably made a big difference for my college & grad school admissions. Most people just don't try this or give up too early or just didn't do the work to research on their own.
Not saying this phenomenon of having connections isn't true, but also, kinda unrelated to the issue here, no?
This kid plagiarized & had serious research misconduct. The fact that he has connections via his sister & dad is not the problem imo.
I agree that research misconduct is different than what I'm describing. I think that students who conduct serious research with local universities (for example) should be celebrated. But I do think the issues are related in that Regeneron needs to think about the (lack of) systems in place for vetting and supporting projects of all types.
Correction: Regeneron is the sponsor, it is the Society for Science that is responsible. When I was there the sponsor was Intel, so I didn't immediately recognize the meaning of "Regeneron"
I imagine this would just lead to it being more closely concealed.
Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.
Heh now wait until you realize what it's like for kids coming from areas near the poverty line. I entered ISEF at a local level on a whim, my science teacher knew I was his brightest but didn't know what to do with me, I borrowed a rundown pair of shirt/slacks my dad retired from job interviews. The experience left such a deep mark on me that even now in the middle of a very successful tech career I remember it. I did a project on perceptrons which I learned about at the local community college library (from a copy of Mitchell's Machine Learning!) because my parents knew it kept weird 'ol me busy and off the streets. Fun times!