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Scandal at America's top science fair

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Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#141

Post by piva00 »

ggambetta wrote: post #89
anal_reactor wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#142

Post by fransje26 »

ipython wrote: post #67

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 i…

> Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify

To earn $55,000...

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#143

Post by ZeroGravitas »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #60
zachlatta wrote: post #23

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.

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?

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#144

Post by distances »

thriftwy wrote: post #132
distances wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#145

Post by esdf »

tromp wrote: post #128
neilv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#146

Post by rerdavies »

fransje26 wrote: post #137
teekert wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that. > That's some serious amount of time 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 c…

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.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#147

Post by thriftwy »

distances wrote: post #144
thriftwy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#148

Post by WitCanStain »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #143
WillPostForFood wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 eli…

>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.

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#149

Post by poulpy123 »

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

Re: Scandal at America's top science fair

#150

Post by teekert »

rerdavies wrote: post #146
fransje26 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that. > That's some serious amount of time 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 c…

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 yo…

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.
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