<p>Put your guilt to work - redo the experiment. Then revise your findings and send them on to ISEF to say you pursued avenues that you didn’t prior to the competition. Then you can be guilt-free about putting it on your apps. It will appease your guilt in a way that a simple letter of confession couldn’t. I would not say anything that would smudge the reputation of your or your best friend. This is such an invaluable lesson to learn - I’m positive you will never do this again. Good Luck!</p>
<p>Thanks for the continued suggestions. As for the community service idea- in all honesty I have done considerable amounts of community service work, but I’m afraid that hasn’t helped much with my dealing with this issue. Also, to ABlestMom, I think you have a good idea about redo-ing the experiment, but I am already largely involved in another project and at this late in the game I don’t think it would be feasible to do all that work over again. I have talked this over with my parents, and considering all of the options, I like the short note/ addendum idea the best. It seems to solve most of the problems- I can be up front with colleges about what happened, I can explicitly say I don’t want the award considered, and I can do all that entirely on my own behalf without implicating my partner. For those of you that posted other ideas, please let me know if you think this could be an acceptable one.</p>