Science Fairs Aren't So Fair

To me, that's the basic assumption that you have to start with. Afterwords, you're free to figure out how to make things more fair, but if you don't start out understanding that things will always be messed up, you're left with a senseless rant.

From what I got through it seems like the author was upset that some parents can spend more time with their kids and that teachers were setting a high standard, and that wealth in families can function as a privilege for children. Those seem like pretty fundamental issues to me. The science fair is maybe like a microcosm of life that way, but I didn't get what was a problem unique to it.

The whole idea of making children compete is questionable, and once you bring money in it completely loses reason to exist.

"Last year my son, who was in third grade at the time, came home with a sheet of paper from his school that listed three categories for appropriate projects: developing a hypothesis and conducting an experiment to test that theory, inventing something new, or researching 'something specific.' The guidelines listed 'whales' as an example of something specific. Given that my son was 8 years old, the idea that he could, on his own, do any single one of these things seemed ludicrous."

Ok, so here we have a parent which completely doubts what their kid can do. In my experience this is a pretty bad place for a parent to be, as the kids seem to always be more capable than parents expectation.

But the author really drives it home here:

"Even the easiest of these items—researching a topic—is nearly impossible for a child who hasn’t yet mastered the ability to browse the Internet. (As a parent and the founder of a tech company, I’ve observed that in order to browse the Internet one needs to know how to scan the screen, differentiate between actual content and ads, and evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource—elements that are far out of reach of most 8-year-olds.)"

Get that? Browse the Internet? Here is a question, how hard is it to pick up the volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the big "W" on the spine and turn to the page on "Whales" ? Not that hard. I'm sure the problem with that is that an 8 year old cannot be expected to drive themselves to the library. (only half joking).

But in context it says volumes about the parent and very little about the child. Even the poorest child can research things like the kinds of insects that live in their neighborhood. The sad part about this article is not that Science Fairs are not fair, its that parents don't know what science is and so cannot help there children develop a sense of wonder and discovery.

And what is truly heartbreaking for me is that the author's child has no hope of learning what science is from this person, and if they don't get it in school, well they will grow up believing anything they read on the Internet as truth. That makes for a very sad story indeed.

Here's my perspective on the whole thing. Take it as you will.

At the regional science fairs (where everyone starts out), there are a lot of people there who are only doing it because they have to. Usually, their high school requires it. A lot of these projects are shit, and a lot of them also clearly stole the idea or got help from their parents. All of these get eliminated at the regional level.

Then, we have the state level fairs.

When it comes to engineering projects (mechanical, electrical, or computer), almost 100% of the projects are actually done by the students themselves. It's very easy for engineering judges to tell when someone's bullshitting or didn't actually put in the work, so almost none of the bullshitters make it to the state level. Most of these people don't have any immediate family members who could help them, even if they wanted help.

When it comes to biological sciences (medicine especially) the situation is much different. Almost everyone in this category knows their shit, but it's a lot harder to say if they actually did the work themselves or not. A lot of the projects absolutely require that the students work in industrial lab environments. It's impossible for a student doing MRSA research to work in a lab below BSL-2, for example. A lot of these students get lab access through their parents (who may be doctors or researchers or something), so it's very likely they are working alongside their parent, and it's possible that they are working with the help of their parent. A huge portion of students doing this kind of research do have an immediate family member who can (and, with some likelihood, does) help them.

Because it's much harder for judges to sniff out people who didn't do original work in the biological sciences category, you get a lot more bullshitters in this category making it all the way to the top science fairs. They're still usually experts in whatever they're researching, but they didn't necessarily put in the thought or effort themselves.

When I was at Intel's international fair, the guy who won the top prize claimed to do some sort of cancer-detection research. It was pretty impressive stuff, but after the science fair a whole bunch of incriminating stuff came out. IIRC, there was some situation where his parent had a position of power at some major research university, and he essentially plagiarized the research of some researcher there with minor changes, but it was soon enough after the actual research that no one caught it.

I can't speak as much to the other categories (sociology, mathematics, etc.). I didn't have a lot of experience with those.

That's not true. I've seen better (original) science fair work than some PhD theses. It's just 1/1000 students that can pull it off.