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.
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.
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?
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.
You ready to let them mess up their future, in the name of not being called an helicopter parent?
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).
This kid plagiarized & had serious research misconduct. The fact that he has connections via his sister & dad is not the problem imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pai's mistake was _deciding_ to commit research fraud, and then doing it.
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.
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"
Therefore anything they do that is bad is a mistake.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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 seem to remember folks getting jailed/fired/fined for that.
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).
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.
How about you give them some time to go through the process?
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 bet that even after all this, that kid will still be better off having cheated than not.
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.
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?
Maybe community service equivalent to 50,000.00 at federal minimum wage would sort him out.
For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
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.
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.
Yeah, in the arts maybe, but not in the sciences.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Click around on Karlstack some more.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This guy probably has a long and profitable career as a scientist ahead of him.
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.
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.
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.
To earn $55,000...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
'What's the hurry, son?'
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.
