Actually, this sounds almost identical to (former) Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These corrupt people are the Rosie Ruiz’s of science…and they wonder why so many people are skeptical about climate science, medicine, etc.
The Harvard President plagiarism claims were politically motivated, if you actually look at them, they are negligent. They were politically motivated because she spoke against Israel (and not even directly), which is no-no.
Politically motivated claims can still be true, someone can be politically motivated in pointing out I am a corrupt city councilor who steals from the city and pays out contracts to friends. If it is true I still need to go.
Counterpoint: The heads of our major academic institutions should meet the basic standards we expect of undergrads and not be picked on the basis of their skin color.
This reminds me of a student I had in Precalc (dark time in life, reduced to HS teaching, albeit outstanding district, for a while, wondering how my life had gone so wrong - long story I would not share with NYT reporter but everyone would know some of the names involved).
Anyway, this child's father (single parent) was insanely set on him being a genius, a prodigy, and pushed him to take Precalc as a 6th grader. The kid had the performance down. He would confidently draw out diagrams and spout physics formulas, act like a "genius." The problem was that my B.S. was in physics and he did not know what he was talking about, was just aping vocabulary. I complained to admin that he should under no circumstances be admitted to Precalc but I was overridden.
He could not understand the material; no one wanted to work with him because he brought their scores down (Common Core forced group work and teacher evaluations depended on it, insane). The child had a nervous breakdown at age 11 and had to leave school.
Now I wonder if I should have reported the father to CPS, yet the government seems like such a dystopian last case option. That poor kid is going to have to find his way. (My own mom was schizophrenic. We found our way.)
I mean...it is basically babysitting. Someone with a physics degree is typically aiming a bit higher. You get a very small group of kids that you can actually teach physics to (5 if you're lucky), and a very large group of kids that you basically just have to manage. It's not aspirational. I think we should be able to admit that. The teaching tracks in a physics degree skip all the important courses.
I was always a bit skeptical of those science contests when my kids checked them out. It required a lot of support that a typical high schooler couldn't get on his/her own at a normal school and average parents.
As a scientist parent who recently helped guide his third grader's school science project, I think you are right. There was no prize money or ranking that anyone could win and it was meant as a positive learning experience, so no harm done.
I kind of got into it and it was a bonding opportunity for me and my kid. For older kids where prize money and college admissions are on the line, parents surely make a huge difference.
I really could never get interested in these sort of things as in my experience always the 10 year old with the most amazing science project who had "zero" help from his parents...and it turns out their amazing project on say freshwater aquifer recharge...was in no way assisted by their parent who is a professor of biology with an emphasis on wetland and aquifer management.
It always seems like once you get to a high level that is the case like 90% of the time. It is never Sally the autodidact whose got a single mom who works at Walmart.
If you want to have an actual science contest for kids, have ones where their parents can't do 80% of it and then teach them some lines/cue cards.
Like if you want to have a science contest for kids, give them a problem and some experimental apparatus and stick them in a room for a day without outside help and see what they come up with. Don't give them a months long project where they can have their parents do it for them, or just steal it like this.
As a former ISEF judge, I must express concern that while this recent scandal is troubling, it pales in comparison to a more pervasive and severe issue at ISEF: inappropriate research credit attribution. As leveraging ISEF awards to gain admission to Ivy League schools becomes increasingly effective, students have started to pay mentors for their ideas and even their research work. The extent of the problem is evident in the proliferation of ads for "research mentors" on social media and other venues. This undermines both academic integrity and equity among students. Regrettably, ISEF lacks effective mechanisms to prevent this. High school student research competitions and awards should all be cancelled. Research at this early stage should not be about winning awards; it should be about innovation and learning. High schoolers would benefit more from focusing on their creativity and individuality. Let them enjoy the research process organically. Plus, there are ample journals and conferences available for them to professionally present their results.
I beg to differ. The competition aspect is part of why I did it for 6 years (grade 7-12) in the 1970s, and why I support it now by judging at all levels. It gives students who aren’t star athletes (or middling athletes) a way to be a star. This is particularly important in high school
it’s nice to be abstract and talk about “let’s do it for the love of learning”, but that doesn’t come with other desirable reinforcements. As long as have competition in anything in schools, science fairs should be part of it, just as we have performing arts, speech and debate, academic decathlon, writing contests, and athletics.
There have always been ringers, in any activity, and yes, it’s challenging for science fairs to figure out how to police this. But I think it’s a small fraction of the finalists. Certainly, none of the projects I judged in Engineering have seemed to have abnormal influence from a paid mentor - there were some exceedingly poor uses of fantastic resources, but there were also outstanding uses of limited resources.
While it is possible to publish in peer reviewed journals (I did, in the 1970s, with my science project, but it was really unusual) and present at conferences, the time scale is quite a bit longer than the typical academic year. As you’ve probably noticed from ISEF, the finalists are working on their projects up to the day they put up the display at the feeder fair, and sometimes after that. Most journals have a 6 month or longer review cycle, if not longer.
While I agree with you about the value of competitions for high school researchers, the landscape has drastically changed since the 1970s. The rise of commercialized college application consulting services has transformed student competitions into tools for building impressive profiles. It's now common to see for-hire coaches advertising their students' ISEF successes. From these ads, it's evident that these coaches are overly involved. Of course, these are just ads, and verifying claims of inappropriate research credit is near impossible due to lack of identifiable evidence. So, I’m going to shift the discussion slightly to another situation that has more identifiable evidence. It is perhaps less unethical but stemming from similar motivations: many high school researchers now work with college professors on federally funded research projects, so their work is considered high-end and has a higher chance of winning. Unfortunately (and naturally), their academic preparation only allows them to work on some easy extension of professors’ long-standing research or merely conduct experiments, rather than craft their original ideas. In fact, at least one award-winning engineering project this year clearly shows significant mentor influence based on the mentor’s publication record. ISEF claims to value student-designed research and discourages cookbook-style following. Unfortunately, this philosophy isn’t well-enforced during evaluations. Over the past few years, I've noticed an increasing number of winning projects heavily influenced by mentors among ISEF finalists. My point is, we are not very prepared for tackling the inappropriate credit attribution issue. But not addressing it well can only harm our young researchers—including those who cheated and those who didn’t. Those who didn't are, of course, unfairly disadvantaged. Those who did may develop a deformed understanding of research and become the false researchers we all hate to see. This makes me wonder whether the current ISEF format is truly nurturing student creativity or simply promoting premature professionalization. Shouldn't we encourage high school students to cultivate their innovative spirit and creativity, even at the risk of venturing into the sci-fi side, at this early academic stage? Keeping competitions, maybe, but we urgently need a thorough reevaluation and potential transformation of the competition judging mechanisms.
Indeed, the whole college application process has radically changed since I was doing it 40+ years ago (I have children who have gone through it). That’s a whole other problem; in the 70s, nobody would have thought about applying to 10 colleges - just the work involved in handwriting or typing the 10 applications would have been an ordeal. And there wasn’t the thing of “accumulating credentials” - which is definitely a thing now.
I suppose, like all things, market based solutions arise to achieve results, whether ethical or not.
Great points. You made me reevaluate my own experience with high school and college lab interns. I'm not sure any of them left with a feel for quality science, but some did get good at measuring stuff and using software. Heck, my own high school and college lab work was largely a sham that mainly served to get me up the next educational rung and/or keep the lab funding intact. On that last point, how many projects are motivated entirely by professors wanting "Champion ISEF Mentor" on their CVs?
"Promoting premature professionalization" is exactly it. The current setup sadly matches many degraded aspects of STEM academia, and I'd be surprised if many ISEF leaders view these issues with genuine concern given how ethically vacant modern STEM culture is.
It'd be one thing if this was just a problem with the kids -- that is, ISEF needs to address the occasional dastardly 17yo. But you've made it clear that conniving adults are the bigger problem. The two-stage judging I proposed below wouldn't erase the influence of said adults. On the other hand, I can't think of rules that aren't overly austere and unfair in new ways. Disqualify parents in STEM? What about professor-mentors? Or give a score boost to apparently independent work? None seem good.
This is similar to the never-ending authorship standards issue--another issue I wouldn't dare impose my immensely unpopular opinions on.
It just results in people buying their way to success. I am a professional researcher in math. The reality is that a high school student can't perform what could be called "original research". Heck, few PhD students truly do original work. What a high school student can do is get a mentor who is a real researcher (so...money), and use that researcher's ideas. This isn't productive. We should just be honest about what it takes to do original work. It is very difficult, and takes nearly a decade of training. Much work has been done, doing new stuff is not easy.
We lie to high school students by pretending this is possible, and we set a bar in a place they can't reach. I feel this way whenever I see a popular article that says "high school student proves theorem that had mathematicians stumped for 100 years". This is such a ridiculous thing to say. Inevitably when I look into it, two factors are always present. One, the "theorem" is not actually a theorem of legitimate interest. It wasn't "proved before" because it's not actually an interesting piece of math. It's like simplifying a gigantic equation: sure, I haven't done it, but that doesn't mean someone who does deserves a prize. It's just...not worth doing. We use better techniques that make it unnecessary.
Second, they always have a mathematician mentor. That mathematician already knew how to solve the problem, and fed them the steps piece-meal. To be fair, most PhDs are also earned this way...which makes it that much more ridiculous to pretend high school students are capable of novel work.
Why can't we just let kids be kids? We should be honest about the fact that they are beginners, and that real success takes an enormous amount of time. I hate it when I have to teach kids who grew up in this kind of wealthy system: they think they already know everything despite knowing very little, and it makes them difficult to teach. It's not helpful.
Alternate scenario: The (parental?) pressure of achieving wrought this slick-looking but worthless Edison. I mean, submitting an entry at least shows effort, right? he probably figures. The kid thought no way in hell is he gonna win.
Former ISEF judge here: The way that ISEF is judged isn’t going to find fraud of this type. Each judge talks to the finalist for about 15 minutes. There will be a dozen or so judges for that project, who all judge a number of other projects in the category - Typically there’s about as many judges as there are projects, and the projects are distributed among the judges with lots of overlaps. That is, three judges might judge project A, but they won’t all judge project B, C, and D. Overall though, there’s coverage during the one very long day of judging.
Each judge does their scoring, and then ALL the judges in the category get together in a caucus to review the scores and pick winners by a sort of consensus process. If there’s a project that is a standout in the early part of the day, at lunch time, there might be a comment that “hey you should go look at project X and see what you think”, and that would be factored in the end of day caucus.
You’re not going to find a false image by this process, unless one of the judges happened to recognize it. If the finalist copied from some obscure source, that’s unlikely. It sometimes takes years for this sort of thing to get caught (although reverse image searches does make it easier now).
The other way in which a false image might be caught is if it’s inconsistent with the rest of the project’s execution. You’re looking at a display board, for the most part (sometimes there’s a more detailed report to read), and you’ve talked to the finalist, so hopefully, you get a feeling (in 15 minutes) for their skill level, access to equipment and techniques, etc. If you had a bunch of blurry cellphone pictures and one gorgeous scanning electron micrograph, you might ask about the discrepancy.
Bogus work or cheating, if caught, is usually because the finalist isn’t convincing about their story - how they came up with the idea, how they chose their experimental method, what problems they had, what would they do next. That said, if someone set out to cheat, and they practiced up, it would not be hard - after all, otherwise savvy professionals get conned every day by criminals. But usually a story that doesn’t hang together is just a sign of a disorganized finalist, and typically, they don’t get rated highly.
This is very different from journal peer review, where the reviewer has weeks to look at a paper, perhaps go out and do some literature searches, etc. which might turn up a copied image. There are occasionally finalists with projects that duplicate someone else’s work. But not by copying their work, but because it was obscure. You catch those because one of the judges says “hey, I had a grad student publish something much like that 30 years ago” - so there, it’s a knock on the originality and thoroughness of the finalists background research.
I think that is the bigger part of this story i.e. the judging seems to be so random and poor quality. This project seems to have so many inconsistencies that it should have been easily caught. The student is claiming to have used computer vision to make a low-cost spectrometer which works in the 800-1600 nm range. Which low-cost camera did he use? Silicon cameras don't work for these wavelengths. InGaAs cameras are much larger in size and quite expensive (over $10,000). How did he fit it in the form factor being shown? This is just a simple example. Just having the spectrometer with the results being shown would be revolutionary to many fields.
The students work so hard and spend so much time to then face this arbitrary judging where the story you make seems to be more important than the science you do. I don't think these science fairs are serving science well. They are making it into a competitive game. Maybe it would be better to have a science exposition or conference where the students send their work and then give talks about it just like a conference and no prizes. Let it be a celebration of scientific discovery.
Depending on the category, the judges may not have expertise in the instrumentation - to them, it’s a box in the lab that generates data. I judged engineering - I know a lot about that, and can detect BS, but if someone presented something like a clever flow cytometer used for immunology for leukemia (my daughter’s PhD area), I’d be looking at the mechanism and detector, and wouldn’t realize if the test samples they were feeding it were totally bogus, since I know next to nothing about the details of prepping cells, tagging various kinds, etc.
Also, the ISEF judging structure is more like presenting a poster at a conference than submitting a paper to a journal. You get to ISEF by doing well at a feeder fair (Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, in this case. In which I competed back in the 70s), but the judging format is essentially the same - stand up interviews for a few minutes with a succession of judges.
I think the competition aspect, particularly in high school, is important. Your average science interested person (aka nerd) doesn’t achieve fame like “captain of the football team” - the science fair gives them a way to demonstrate that achievement. Getting selected at your school to go to the regional is a big deal, getting selected at the regional/county to go to the state is a big deal, getting to be a finalist at ISEF is a really big deal (as in they pay for your travel, etc.). - it’s the fact that *someone else* judged you and was willing to invest their money in you. (Which is different from you just paying for yourself to attend a conference).
Even a bigger deal if you’re coming from a different country. I’m sure the dude who did well at ISEF who built a rice paddy dike building machine in Sri Lanka was pretty stoked to be at ISEF in Phoenix or LA (I can’t remember, but the project was cool when I was judging). And I’ll bet he received some degree of fame and adulation from his classmates.
There’s already plenty of symposia, workshops, presentation venues for students at high school level that are non-competitive. It’s not the same.
So maybe it’s time to get better judging. No offense, but if an engineer is put in place to judge the feasibility of a dna sequence adjuster, you’re gonna have idiocracy. And that’s obviously what happened. Or he’s the only one with hue. And that’s maybe also what happened.
They may not be serving actual science well, but they do prepare unscrupulous students for academic science quite well. Need that tenure packet padded? Whip up a filler paper at any cost. Did that dumb reviewer really request another experiment? No need; just shuffle around your current data. Really want that grant? Pepper in all the hot buzzwords despite no actual relevance to your work.
I hope the judges aren't under the illusion that they are differentiating project quality to any fine degree or with any great accuracy. That's fine, because most projects are both honest (I hope) and not destined to win.
in the case of plagiarizing images, couldn't they just ask students to submit their posters and then run through an originality check? do they not require this (I'm surprised if they don't)?
Plagiarism detection is a fairly new technology and has its share of problems. If you get any significant number of false positives, then there’s a lot of manual intervention required. ISEF is fundamentally depending on volunteers for most of the judging and evaluation - I’m not sure you could find enough volunteers to spend the time required. It’s a challenge to get enough judges for a 1 1/2 day judging stint, particularly spread across the various fields.
One also has to be careful about creating processes that aren’t compatible with entries from around the world. Not everywhere has high speed internet, for instance.
Your last paragraph has a solution: scrutinize the finalists in each category, like peer review, and leave the rest alone. As you and others have said, having a competitive opportunity for "nerds" to communicate their problem solving and get feedback is excellent. But how in God's name is that an acceptable judging system with that much $ on the line? (Keep in mind, the main financial awards are often accompanied by more cash, scholarships, and opportunities by other awarding groups.)
Give the top three students "finalist" designation on the day-of, spend a week putting their projects through the ringer, and then assign rankings if nothing fishy is uncovered. That investigative week need not involve the students directly, although it could. Rather, throw their figures and text into plagiarism detectors, pore through their raw data/code/whatever, check citations, etc. It won't detect undue parental influence, but crap like this kid's project would never stand a chance and everyone who wants a shot at the big bucks will know what they're up against. One issue is what to do when a finalist is disqualified -- maybe a few top non-finalists on a secret waitlist?
Then again, the absolutely abysmal quality of peer review I've seen in my field, even in top journals, makes me wonder if enough competent judges exist for this.
A few years back my kid had participated in our country’s science fair, EUCYS, and ISEF. His experience at EUCYS was completely different than ISEF (he won grand awards at both, not top ones at ISEF). At EUCYS, he had to submit a 10 page research paper which was run through plagiarism checks. At the fair, the judges were all active researchers and some very famous names. The interviews lasted over an hour each and some even went over couple of hours. He was doing an interdisciplinary work and he had experts from each area his work touched upon, not just the broad category. He was even grilled on his introduction to see whether he had read the papers he was citing. He said the interviews felt like conversation between two scientists even though he was talking to some really big names. He even got suggestions of how to improve his work and came out of the competition with new ideas. He loved the experience. Judging was quite rigorous but more importantly the atmosphere was collaborative,
ISEF on the other hand felt like a marketing conference and he refused to go there again. The judges spent 10-15 minutes and asked very cursory questions. One spent more time talking about the weather than his project. He was asked not to talk about the short-comings in his work, which he refused to do. And the atmosphere was very cut-throat, not the collaborative one he had been exposed to till then. He came out of the experience very unispired.
This year two projects from our country which one big at EUCYS didn’t get anything at ISEF. One of these got in trouble because she had a peer-reviewed Q1 journal paper she had publsihed in her folder. So peer-reviewed published research didn’t get anything while an amateurishly plagiarixed work with red flags all over received a top award. In my opinion, ISEF can learn a lot from how EUCYS is run if they still want the competitive aspect.
I’m not familiar with EUCYS - how many entrants are there? What’s the selection process to get there?
For ISEF, you need to be selected from a “feeder fair”, and there’s hundreds of finalists (all entrants at ISEF are called finalists) being judged in a day (by roughly the same number of judges as entrants).
About 140-150 projects in a given year. You need to win or place at the top two or three in your country's science fair/competition to get there. My country sends about 18 projects to ISEF and 2 to EUCYS. I believe ISEF sends two projects to EUCYS. I also don't think ISEF sent projects have won anything at EUCYS for the last decade.
Judging happens over 3 days, not 1 like ISEF. Even in my country's fair, judging happens over 2 days for about 400 projects. First day is like ISEF and then on the second day, the top 30-50 projects are judged by a team of active researchers for the top awards.
EUCYS judging sounds more rigorous than a grad-level defense! That's an excellent rebuttal to ISEF model, and really to the pervasive corner-cutting that adult scientists engage in. Good for them.
Agree with others on here that this need to be dealt with seriously not as a rap on the knuckle for a 17 year old. If not fixed now, with this standard of ethics, please expect a novel genetically engineered coronavirus to be unleashed a few years from now. From Krish Pai's ISEF paper - "In the future, I would like to physically genetically engineer the optimized DNA sequence into E. Coli using CRISPR-Cas9 and observe their MPB capabilities in various controlled environments"
The award must be revoked. There should also be some investigation or action on the research mentor. 17 years olds do not work on graduate level research ideas without help from a adult mentor. Every ISEF project needs a adult mentor/sponsor. ISEF needs to clamp down on the spate of competitors claiming to do cancer research - the playing field is not level , only kids with access to specialized labs through parents/family friends are able to compete effectively, not kids with their own original ideas.
The plastic testing image has been directly cropped from this 2022 research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00203-022-03306-w (Figure 1). Further the infrared spectrometer device being shown is actually a multispectral detector. It shines LEDs at different wavelengths and measures the reflection. Thus, the measurement should only have a few discrete points, but the measurements being shown are continuous spectra.
The award must be revoked. There should also be some investigation or action on the research mentor. 17 years olds do not work on graduate level research ideas without help from a adult mentor. Every ISEF project needs a adult mentor/sponsor. ISEF needs to clamp down on the spate of competitors claiming to do cancer research - the playing field is not level , only kids with access to specialized labs through parents/family friends are able to compete effectively, not kids with their own original ideas.
While the adult supervisor(s) of the finalist should be involved (in the consequences), it’s not true that finalists need specialized labs. Many of the finalists in Engineering in the years I judged essentially did their work in their home, farm, or yard. Sure, some got access to specialized facilities, but the judges take account of “effective use of available resources”.
And these days, you can do cutting edge research in your garage - Anyone can buy computer resources (or get them free) from Amazon and Azure. Anyone can send things to be sequenced or have PCR done. Sure, some finalists have made connections that allow them to use a university lab or similar. I did it myself back in the 1970s, but it wasn’t my parents (other than them telling me how to do it)- No, I met a researcher on a tour at a Science Fair, then later called him up, then trekked down on the bus to meet him and talk about possibilities. He had space in his lab and offered to help. All my project, all my ideas, etc.
The sponsor/parents should be part of the sanctions/consequences, yes.
But lots of ISEF finalists do their work at their home or school. These days, it’s pretty easy for a researcher to send samples out for sequencing or PCR. You can get computing resources from Amazon or Azure. People have been doing cutting edge research for decades (see, e.g. THe Amateur Scientist column by C.L. Stong in Scientific American).
Yes, some finalists get access to labs through friends and parents, but the judges DO take into account “effective use of resources”.
Yes. Maturing requires traveling a hard and sometimes brutal road. He might be a quite capable young guy and having the bad parts thwarted early gives an opportunity for the better ones to grow.
This was a classy post! Clearly the kid did wrong and should not receive the award or title--and should probably lose the internship too--but I agree that it shouldn't completely define the rest of his life either. Who among us wasn't pretty stupid at 17?
This kid wasn't stupid. The fraud here isn't a work of genius but it's also not something a total idiot could pull off. What he seems to lack is any sense of ethics, which I'm not sure is something people age out of. Kids who kill animals for fun might grow out of it but might also simply turn into fucked up adults.
That's fair... sociopathic behavior earlier is not unlikely to show up later. The consequences need to be stark and painful and to some extent permanent, but I still think if someone is talented enough to pull off something like that stunt they might have some more to offer!
It's definitely a troubling story, especially since the kid seems to have not 'fessed up yet. He certainly has two strikes in my book and scientists doing work with such implications for people's lives need to be held to a high standard. Yet I did some regrettable things at that age (if not quite that regrettable) and ultimately matured from the experience. I just still think some sort of path to redemption needs to be available, at least until strike three.
I'm a former Westinghouse STS winner ('87) - so yeah, I got some 'pinions.
1. Absolutely fair game. This is scientific misconduct, at a high level, and I don't care what age he is.
2. A complete embarrassment to the judges. I don't know who they've got reading papers anymore, but wow.
3. This is a perfect reflection of where "the science" culture is right now - *everywhere*. Not just in the social (pseudo)sciences, but in STEM, too.
4. #3 is a direct result of a broken philosophy of science which has resulted in entire fields of complete statistical nonsense - noise, nothing more than - parading around as "the science."
Just look at companies like Polygence, CCIR, Luminaire, and Pioneer. They help kids fabricate scientific research ideas and send them for publications and science fairs. They teach them how to present the ideas as their own and make it sounds original, so they can convince judges that they are little geniuses. I know kids in my hometown who did this. They aren't that smart at school but after they join these online research projects, they suddenly become genius overnight, winning gold medals and STS etc. That's the latest trend for college admission these days.
Future Harvard Presidents have to start somewhere...
Actually, this sounds almost identical to (former) Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These corrupt people are the Rosie Ruiz’s of science…and they wonder why so many people are skeptical about climate science, medicine, etc.
Beat me to it. 😁
You're funny!
The Harvard President plagiarism claims were politically motivated, if you actually look at them, they are negligent. They were politically motivated because she spoke against Israel (and not even directly), which is no-no.
Politically motivated claims can still be true, someone can be politically motivated in pointing out I am a corrupt city councilor who steals from the city and pays out contracts to friends. If it is true I still need to go.
>Negligent. That means the claims were trivial.
Negligent homicide has entered the chat.
Negligent simply describes the act of one failing to take proper care.
Thats just like your opinion man.
Counterpoint: The heads of our major academic institutions should meet the basic standards we expect of undergrads and not be picked on the basis of their skin color.
This reminds me of a student I had in Precalc (dark time in life, reduced to HS teaching, albeit outstanding district, for a while, wondering how my life had gone so wrong - long story I would not share with NYT reporter but everyone would know some of the names involved).
Anyway, this child's father (single parent) was insanely set on him being a genius, a prodigy, and pushed him to take Precalc as a 6th grader. The kid had the performance down. He would confidently draw out diagrams and spout physics formulas, act like a "genius." The problem was that my B.S. was in physics and he did not know what he was talking about, was just aping vocabulary. I complained to admin that he should under no circumstances be admitted to Precalc but I was overridden.
He could not understand the material; no one wanted to work with him because he brought their scores down (Common Core forced group work and teacher evaluations depended on it, insane). The child had a nervous breakdown at age 11 and had to leave school.
Now I wonder if I should have reported the father to CPS, yet the government seems like such a dystopian last case option. That poor kid is going to have to find his way. (My own mom was schizophrenic. We found our way.)
How dreadful you were reduced to teaching high school! How did you ever come back from such a blow? 🙄
I mean...it is basically babysitting. Someone with a physics degree is typically aiming a bit higher. You get a very small group of kids that you can actually teach physics to (5 if you're lucky), and a very large group of kids that you basically just have to manage. It's not aspirational. I think we should be able to admit that. The teaching tracks in a physics degree skip all the important courses.
I was always a bit skeptical of those science contests when my kids checked them out. It required a lot of support that a typical high schooler couldn't get on his/her own at a normal school and average parents.
As a scientist parent who recently helped guide his third grader's school science project, I think you are right. There was no prize money or ranking that anyone could win and it was meant as a positive learning experience, so no harm done.
I kind of got into it and it was a bonding opportunity for me and my kid. For older kids where prize money and college admissions are on the line, parents surely make a huge difference.
I really could never get interested in these sort of things as in my experience always the 10 year old with the most amazing science project who had "zero" help from his parents...and it turns out their amazing project on say freshwater aquifer recharge...was in no way assisted by their parent who is a professor of biology with an emphasis on wetland and aquifer management.
It always seems like once you get to a high level that is the case like 90% of the time. It is never Sally the autodidact whose got a single mom who works at Walmart.
If you want to have an actual science contest for kids, have ones where their parents can't do 80% of it and then teach them some lines/cue cards.
Like if you want to have a science contest for kids, give them a problem and some experimental apparatus and stick them in a room for a day without outside help and see what they come up with. Don't give them a months long project where they can have their parents do it for them, or just steal it like this.
As a former ISEF judge, I must express concern that while this recent scandal is troubling, it pales in comparison to a more pervasive and severe issue at ISEF: inappropriate research credit attribution. As leveraging ISEF awards to gain admission to Ivy League schools becomes increasingly effective, students have started to pay mentors for their ideas and even their research work. The extent of the problem is evident in the proliferation of ads for "research mentors" on social media and other venues. This undermines both academic integrity and equity among students. Regrettably, ISEF lacks effective mechanisms to prevent this. High school student research competitions and awards should all be cancelled. Research at this early stage should not be about winning awards; it should be about innovation and learning. High schoolers would benefit more from focusing on their creativity and individuality. Let them enjoy the research process organically. Plus, there are ample journals and conferences available for them to professionally present their results.
I beg to differ. The competition aspect is part of why I did it for 6 years (grade 7-12) in the 1970s, and why I support it now by judging at all levels. It gives students who aren’t star athletes (or middling athletes) a way to be a star. This is particularly important in high school
it’s nice to be abstract and talk about “let’s do it for the love of learning”, but that doesn’t come with other desirable reinforcements. As long as have competition in anything in schools, science fairs should be part of it, just as we have performing arts, speech and debate, academic decathlon, writing contests, and athletics.
There have always been ringers, in any activity, and yes, it’s challenging for science fairs to figure out how to police this. But I think it’s a small fraction of the finalists. Certainly, none of the projects I judged in Engineering have seemed to have abnormal influence from a paid mentor - there were some exceedingly poor uses of fantastic resources, but there were also outstanding uses of limited resources.
While it is possible to publish in peer reviewed journals (I did, in the 1970s, with my science project, but it was really unusual) and present at conferences, the time scale is quite a bit longer than the typical academic year. As you’ve probably noticed from ISEF, the finalists are working on their projects up to the day they put up the display at the feeder fair, and sometimes after that. Most journals have a 6 month or longer review cycle, if not longer.
While I agree with you about the value of competitions for high school researchers, the landscape has drastically changed since the 1970s. The rise of commercialized college application consulting services has transformed student competitions into tools for building impressive profiles. It's now common to see for-hire coaches advertising their students' ISEF successes. From these ads, it's evident that these coaches are overly involved. Of course, these are just ads, and verifying claims of inappropriate research credit is near impossible due to lack of identifiable evidence. So, I’m going to shift the discussion slightly to another situation that has more identifiable evidence. It is perhaps less unethical but stemming from similar motivations: many high school researchers now work with college professors on federally funded research projects, so their work is considered high-end and has a higher chance of winning. Unfortunately (and naturally), their academic preparation only allows them to work on some easy extension of professors’ long-standing research or merely conduct experiments, rather than craft their original ideas. In fact, at least one award-winning engineering project this year clearly shows significant mentor influence based on the mentor’s publication record. ISEF claims to value student-designed research and discourages cookbook-style following. Unfortunately, this philosophy isn’t well-enforced during evaluations. Over the past few years, I've noticed an increasing number of winning projects heavily influenced by mentors among ISEF finalists. My point is, we are not very prepared for tackling the inappropriate credit attribution issue. But not addressing it well can only harm our young researchers—including those who cheated and those who didn’t. Those who didn't are, of course, unfairly disadvantaged. Those who did may develop a deformed understanding of research and become the false researchers we all hate to see. This makes me wonder whether the current ISEF format is truly nurturing student creativity or simply promoting premature professionalization. Shouldn't we encourage high school students to cultivate their innovative spirit and creativity, even at the risk of venturing into the sci-fi side, at this early academic stage? Keeping competitions, maybe, but we urgently need a thorough reevaluation and potential transformation of the competition judging mechanisms.
Indeed, the whole college application process has radically changed since I was doing it 40+ years ago (I have children who have gone through it). That’s a whole other problem; in the 70s, nobody would have thought about applying to 10 colleges - just the work involved in handwriting or typing the 10 applications would have been an ordeal. And there wasn’t the thing of “accumulating credentials” - which is definitely a thing now.
I suppose, like all things, market based solutions arise to achieve results, whether ethical or not.
Great points. You made me reevaluate my own experience with high school and college lab interns. I'm not sure any of them left with a feel for quality science, but some did get good at measuring stuff and using software. Heck, my own high school and college lab work was largely a sham that mainly served to get me up the next educational rung and/or keep the lab funding intact. On that last point, how many projects are motivated entirely by professors wanting "Champion ISEF Mentor" on their CVs?
"Promoting premature professionalization" is exactly it. The current setup sadly matches many degraded aspects of STEM academia, and I'd be surprised if many ISEF leaders view these issues with genuine concern given how ethically vacant modern STEM culture is.
It'd be one thing if this was just a problem with the kids -- that is, ISEF needs to address the occasional dastardly 17yo. But you've made it clear that conniving adults are the bigger problem. The two-stage judging I proposed below wouldn't erase the influence of said adults. On the other hand, I can't think of rules that aren't overly austere and unfair in new ways. Disqualify parents in STEM? What about professor-mentors? Or give a score boost to apparently independent work? None seem good.
This is similar to the never-ending authorship standards issue--another issue I wouldn't dare impose my immensely unpopular opinions on.
It just results in people buying their way to success. I am a professional researcher in math. The reality is that a high school student can't perform what could be called "original research". Heck, few PhD students truly do original work. What a high school student can do is get a mentor who is a real researcher (so...money), and use that researcher's ideas. This isn't productive. We should just be honest about what it takes to do original work. It is very difficult, and takes nearly a decade of training. Much work has been done, doing new stuff is not easy.
We lie to high school students by pretending this is possible, and we set a bar in a place they can't reach. I feel this way whenever I see a popular article that says "high school student proves theorem that had mathematicians stumped for 100 years". This is such a ridiculous thing to say. Inevitably when I look into it, two factors are always present. One, the "theorem" is not actually a theorem of legitimate interest. It wasn't "proved before" because it's not actually an interesting piece of math. It's like simplifying a gigantic equation: sure, I haven't done it, but that doesn't mean someone who does deserves a prize. It's just...not worth doing. We use better techniques that make it unnecessary.
Second, they always have a mathematician mentor. That mathematician already knew how to solve the problem, and fed them the steps piece-meal. To be fair, most PhDs are also earned this way...which makes it that much more ridiculous to pretend high school students are capable of novel work.
Why can't we just let kids be kids? We should be honest about the fact that they are beginners, and that real success takes an enormous amount of time. I hate it when I have to teach kids who grew up in this kind of wealthy system: they think they already know everything despite knowing very little, and it makes them difficult to teach. It's not helpful.
Important to look into who the parents are, as well as how USC has embraced this fraud.
I'd bet the apple didn't fall far from the tree, myself. Were I a funder of the parents I would be reexamining their work as well.
Alternate scenario: The (parental?) pressure of achieving wrought this slick-looking but worthless Edison. I mean, submitting an entry at least shows effort, right? he probably figures. The kid thought no way in hell is he gonna win.
Then “The Producers: Redux” happens.
Former ISEF judge here: The way that ISEF is judged isn’t going to find fraud of this type. Each judge talks to the finalist for about 15 minutes. There will be a dozen or so judges for that project, who all judge a number of other projects in the category - Typically there’s about as many judges as there are projects, and the projects are distributed among the judges with lots of overlaps. That is, three judges might judge project A, but they won’t all judge project B, C, and D. Overall though, there’s coverage during the one very long day of judging.
Each judge does their scoring, and then ALL the judges in the category get together in a caucus to review the scores and pick winners by a sort of consensus process. If there’s a project that is a standout in the early part of the day, at lunch time, there might be a comment that “hey you should go look at project X and see what you think”, and that would be factored in the end of day caucus.
You’re not going to find a false image by this process, unless one of the judges happened to recognize it. If the finalist copied from some obscure source, that’s unlikely. It sometimes takes years for this sort of thing to get caught (although reverse image searches does make it easier now).
The other way in which a false image might be caught is if it’s inconsistent with the rest of the project’s execution. You’re looking at a display board, for the most part (sometimes there’s a more detailed report to read), and you’ve talked to the finalist, so hopefully, you get a feeling (in 15 minutes) for their skill level, access to equipment and techniques, etc. If you had a bunch of blurry cellphone pictures and one gorgeous scanning electron micrograph, you might ask about the discrepancy.
Bogus work or cheating, if caught, is usually because the finalist isn’t convincing about their story - how they came up with the idea, how they chose their experimental method, what problems they had, what would they do next. That said, if someone set out to cheat, and they practiced up, it would not be hard - after all, otherwise savvy professionals get conned every day by criminals. But usually a story that doesn’t hang together is just a sign of a disorganized finalist, and typically, they don’t get rated highly.
This is very different from journal peer review, where the reviewer has weeks to look at a paper, perhaps go out and do some literature searches, etc. which might turn up a copied image. There are occasionally finalists with projects that duplicate someone else’s work. But not by copying their work, but because it was obscure. You catch those because one of the judges says “hey, I had a grad student publish something much like that 30 years ago” - so there, it’s a knock on the originality and thoroughness of the finalists background research.
I think that is the bigger part of this story i.e. the judging seems to be so random and poor quality. This project seems to have so many inconsistencies that it should have been easily caught. The student is claiming to have used computer vision to make a low-cost spectrometer which works in the 800-1600 nm range. Which low-cost camera did he use? Silicon cameras don't work for these wavelengths. InGaAs cameras are much larger in size and quite expensive (over $10,000). How did he fit it in the form factor being shown? This is just a simple example. Just having the spectrometer with the results being shown would be revolutionary to many fields.
The students work so hard and spend so much time to then face this arbitrary judging where the story you make seems to be more important than the science you do. I don't think these science fairs are serving science well. They are making it into a competitive game. Maybe it would be better to have a science exposition or conference where the students send their work and then give talks about it just like a conference and no prizes. Let it be a celebration of scientific discovery.
Depending on the category, the judges may not have expertise in the instrumentation - to them, it’s a box in the lab that generates data. I judged engineering - I know a lot about that, and can detect BS, but if someone presented something like a clever flow cytometer used for immunology for leukemia (my daughter’s PhD area), I’d be looking at the mechanism and detector, and wouldn’t realize if the test samples they were feeding it were totally bogus, since I know next to nothing about the details of prepping cells, tagging various kinds, etc.
Also, the ISEF judging structure is more like presenting a poster at a conference than submitting a paper to a journal. You get to ISEF by doing well at a feeder fair (Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, in this case. In which I competed back in the 70s), but the judging format is essentially the same - stand up interviews for a few minutes with a succession of judges.
I think the competition aspect, particularly in high school, is important. Your average science interested person (aka nerd) doesn’t achieve fame like “captain of the football team” - the science fair gives them a way to demonstrate that achievement. Getting selected at your school to go to the regional is a big deal, getting selected at the regional/county to go to the state is a big deal, getting to be a finalist at ISEF is a really big deal (as in they pay for your travel, etc.). - it’s the fact that *someone else* judged you and was willing to invest their money in you. (Which is different from you just paying for yourself to attend a conference).
Even a bigger deal if you’re coming from a different country. I’m sure the dude who did well at ISEF who built a rice paddy dike building machine in Sri Lanka was pretty stoked to be at ISEF in Phoenix or LA (I can’t remember, but the project was cool when I was judging). And I’ll bet he received some degree of fame and adulation from his classmates.
There’s already plenty of symposia, workshops, presentation venues for students at high school level that are non-competitive. It’s not the same.
So maybe it’s time to get better judging. No offense, but if an engineer is put in place to judge the feasibility of a dna sequence adjuster, you’re gonna have idiocracy. And that’s obviously what happened. Or he’s the only one with hue. And that’s maybe also what happened.
No, I don’t think that’s what happened here. It was an example of how modern projects with multiple disciplines involve face judging challenges.
FWIW there are 1800 finalists from all over the world, it’s a really challenging thing to judge
They may not be serving actual science well, but they do prepare unscrupulous students for academic science quite well. Need that tenure packet padded? Whip up a filler paper at any cost. Did that dumb reviewer really request another experiment? No need; just shuffle around your current data. Really want that grant? Pepper in all the hot buzzwords despite no actual relevance to your work.
I hope the judges aren't under the illusion that they are differentiating project quality to any fine degree or with any great accuracy. That's fine, because most projects are both honest (I hope) and not destined to win.
Thanks for this comment Jim. Very informative
in the case of plagiarizing images, couldn't they just ask students to submit their posters and then run through an originality check? do they not require this (I'm surprised if they don't)?
Plagiarism detection is a fairly new technology and has its share of problems. If you get any significant number of false positives, then there’s a lot of manual intervention required. ISEF is fundamentally depending on volunteers for most of the judging and evaluation - I’m not sure you could find enough volunteers to spend the time required. It’s a challenge to get enough judges for a 1 1/2 day judging stint, particularly spread across the various fields.
One also has to be careful about creating processes that aren’t compatible with entries from around the world. Not everywhere has high speed internet, for instance.
Your last paragraph has a solution: scrutinize the finalists in each category, like peer review, and leave the rest alone. As you and others have said, having a competitive opportunity for "nerds" to communicate their problem solving and get feedback is excellent. But how in God's name is that an acceptable judging system with that much $ on the line? (Keep in mind, the main financial awards are often accompanied by more cash, scholarships, and opportunities by other awarding groups.)
Give the top three students "finalist" designation on the day-of, spend a week putting their projects through the ringer, and then assign rankings if nothing fishy is uncovered. That investigative week need not involve the students directly, although it could. Rather, throw their figures and text into plagiarism detectors, pore through their raw data/code/whatever, check citations, etc. It won't detect undue parental influence, but crap like this kid's project would never stand a chance and everyone who wants a shot at the big bucks will know what they're up against. One issue is what to do when a finalist is disqualified -- maybe a few top non-finalists on a secret waitlist?
Then again, the absolutely abysmal quality of peer review I've seen in my field, even in top journals, makes me wonder if enough competent judges exist for this.
A few years back my kid had participated in our country’s science fair, EUCYS, and ISEF. His experience at EUCYS was completely different than ISEF (he won grand awards at both, not top ones at ISEF). At EUCYS, he had to submit a 10 page research paper which was run through plagiarism checks. At the fair, the judges were all active researchers and some very famous names. The interviews lasted over an hour each and some even went over couple of hours. He was doing an interdisciplinary work and he had experts from each area his work touched upon, not just the broad category. He was even grilled on his introduction to see whether he had read the papers he was citing. He said the interviews felt like conversation between two scientists even though he was talking to some really big names. He even got suggestions of how to improve his work and came out of the competition with new ideas. He loved the experience. Judging was quite rigorous but more importantly the atmosphere was collaborative,
ISEF on the other hand felt like a marketing conference and he refused to go there again. The judges spent 10-15 minutes and asked very cursory questions. One spent more time talking about the weather than his project. He was asked not to talk about the short-comings in his work, which he refused to do. And the atmosphere was very cut-throat, not the collaborative one he had been exposed to till then. He came out of the experience very unispired.
This year two projects from our country which one big at EUCYS didn’t get anything at ISEF. One of these got in trouble because she had a peer-reviewed Q1 journal paper she had publsihed in her folder. So peer-reviewed published research didn’t get anything while an amateurishly plagiarixed work with red flags all over received a top award. In my opinion, ISEF can learn a lot from how EUCYS is run if they still want the competitive aspect.
I’m not familiar with EUCYS - how many entrants are there? What’s the selection process to get there?
For ISEF, you need to be selected from a “feeder fair”, and there’s hundreds of finalists (all entrants at ISEF are called finalists) being judged in a day (by roughly the same number of judges as entrants).
About 140-150 projects in a given year. You need to win or place at the top two or three in your country's science fair/competition to get there. My country sends about 18 projects to ISEF and 2 to EUCYS. I believe ISEF sends two projects to EUCYS. I also don't think ISEF sent projects have won anything at EUCYS for the last decade.
Judging happens over 3 days, not 1 like ISEF. Even in my country's fair, judging happens over 2 days for about 400 projects. First day is like ISEF and then on the second day, the top 30-50 projects are judged by a team of active researchers for the top awards.
OK, so about an order of magnitude smaller than ISEF (which I believe was something like 1800 projects this year).
And yet it takes EUCYS thrice the time to judge as compared to ISEF.
EUCYS judging sounds more rigorous than a grad-level defense! That's an excellent rebuttal to ISEF model, and really to the pervasive corner-cutting that adult scientists engage in. Good for them.
Agree with others on here that this need to be dealt with seriously not as a rap on the knuckle for a 17 year old. If not fixed now, with this standard of ethics, please expect a novel genetically engineered coronavirus to be unleashed a few years from now. From Krish Pai's ISEF paper - "In the future, I would like to physically genetically engineer the optimized DNA sequence into E. Coli using CRISPR-Cas9 and observe their MPB capabilities in various controlled environments"
The award must be revoked. There should also be some investigation or action on the research mentor. 17 years olds do not work on graduate level research ideas without help from a adult mentor. Every ISEF project needs a adult mentor/sponsor. ISEF needs to clamp down on the spate of competitors claiming to do cancer research - the playing field is not level , only kids with access to specialized labs through parents/family friends are able to compete effectively, not kids with their own original ideas.
The plastic testing image has been directly cropped from this 2022 research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00203-022-03306-w (Figure 1). Further the infrared spectrometer device being shown is actually a multispectral detector. It shines LEDs at different wavelengths and measures the reflection. Thus, the measurement should only have a few discrete points, but the measurements being shown are continuous spectra.
Future Ivy League president.
The award must be revoked. There should also be some investigation or action on the research mentor. 17 years olds do not work on graduate level research ideas without help from a adult mentor. Every ISEF project needs a adult mentor/sponsor. ISEF needs to clamp down on the spate of competitors claiming to do cancer research - the playing field is not level , only kids with access to specialized labs through parents/family friends are able to compete effectively, not kids with their own original ideas.
While the adult supervisor(s) of the finalist should be involved (in the consequences), it’s not true that finalists need specialized labs. Many of the finalists in Engineering in the years I judged essentially did their work in their home, farm, or yard. Sure, some got access to specialized facilities, but the judges take account of “effective use of available resources”.
And these days, you can do cutting edge research in your garage - Anyone can buy computer resources (or get them free) from Amazon and Azure. Anyone can send things to be sequenced or have PCR done. Sure, some finalists have made connections that allow them to use a university lab or similar. I did it myself back in the 1970s, but it wasn’t my parents (other than them telling me how to do it)- No, I met a researcher on a tour at a Science Fair, then later called him up, then trekked down on the bus to meet him and talk about possibilities. He had space in his lab and offered to help. All my project, all my ideas, etc.
The sponsor/parents should be part of the sanctions/consequences, yes.
But lots of ISEF finalists do their work at their home or school. These days, it’s pretty easy for a researcher to send samples out for sequencing or PCR. You can get computing resources from Amazon or Azure. People have been doing cutting edge research for decades (see, e.g. THe Amateur Scientist column by C.L. Stong in Scientific American).
Yes, some finalists get access to labs through friends and parents, but the judges DO take into account “effective use of resources”.
Yes. Maturing requires traveling a hard and sometimes brutal road. He might be a quite capable young guy and having the bad parts thwarted early gives an opportunity for the better ones to grow.
This was a classy post! Clearly the kid did wrong and should not receive the award or title--and should probably lose the internship too--but I agree that it shouldn't completely define the rest of his life either. Who among us wasn't pretty stupid at 17?
This kid wasn't stupid. The fraud here isn't a work of genius but it's also not something a total idiot could pull off. What he seems to lack is any sense of ethics, which I'm not sure is something people age out of. Kids who kill animals for fun might grow out of it but might also simply turn into fucked up adults.
That's fair... sociopathic behavior earlier is not unlikely to show up later. The consequences need to be stark and painful and to some extent permanent, but I still think if someone is talented enough to pull off something like that stunt they might have some more to offer!
Unfortunately it’s possible to be smart and also unethical. Grows up to be white collar criminal or fraud/scam artist.
It's definitely a troubling story, especially since the kid seems to have not 'fessed up yet. He certainly has two strikes in my book and scientists doing work with such implications for people's lives need to be held to a high standard. Yet I did some regrettable things at that age (if not quite that regrettable) and ultimately matured from the experience. I just still think some sort of path to redemption needs to be available, at least until strike three.
Seems reasonable.
I wasn't.
I was probably stupider at 20 than I was at 17!
I'm a former Westinghouse STS winner ('87) - so yeah, I got some 'pinions.
1. Absolutely fair game. This is scientific misconduct, at a high level, and I don't care what age he is.
2. A complete embarrassment to the judges. I don't know who they've got reading papers anymore, but wow.
3. This is a perfect reflection of where "the science" culture is right now - *everywhere*. Not just in the social (pseudo)sciences, but in STEM, too.
4. #3 is a direct result of a broken philosophy of science which has resulted in entire fields of complete statistical nonsense - noise, nothing more than - parading around as "the science."
Just look at companies like Polygence, CCIR, Luminaire, and Pioneer. They help kids fabricate scientific research ideas and send them for publications and science fairs. They teach them how to present the ideas as their own and make it sounds original, so they can convince judges that they are little geniuses. I know kids in my hometown who did this. They aren't that smart at school but after they join these online research projects, they suddenly become genius overnight, winning gold medals and STS etc. That's the latest trend for college admission these days.
Retractionwatch.com
It should define his life just as much-- no, much more-- as when a 17-year-old robs someone of $50,000 at knifepoint. Put him in the slammer.
Agree