D became an Intel STS semifinalist today, will it help her HYPS application?

DEET
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:09:14 +0000

I suggest that until the playing field does become level, until there is an opportunity for every student who wants to do scientific research at a research lab or under direction of a professional scientist, mathematician, or engineer for a science contest while in high school and who meets whatever application standards are required by the research lab, that steps need to be taken by Society for Science & Public to make sure that both the students using these research labs & mentors and the students who do not have that opportunity are both treated fairly. There are some suggestions below that I would recommend for doing this:

1) For both Intel ISEF and Intel STS determine what percentage of entries overall (for STS) or by category (for ISEF) are from students who based their project either on work they did in a research lab or work that was directed by a person who had either a Master’s or doctorate degree in the same field as the student’s project was in and also determine the percentage of students who only had help from their parents, their high school science teacher, or any other person where none of these people had either a Master’s or doctorate degree in the field being studied.

Then after determining these percentages, give out the awards in the same proportion. For example, if 33% of the entries in ISEF’s Mathematics category came from people who did not work in a research lab or with a mentor who was a professional mathematician, then if there were three 2nd place awards to give out in mathematics you would give two 2nd place awards to the students who used a research lab or a professional mentor and one 2nd place award to a student who did not use a professional lab or mentor.

For ISEF you could also just have three categories of entries – 1) team 2) individual with research lab or professional mentor, and 3) non-research lab individuals.

For the STS, you may want to base the percentages of research lab or professional mentor/non-research lab students who are named semi-finalists and finalists on the ratio of entries received from Research lab/non-research lab entrants. Then, for the top 10 finalists awards, use the same ratio again.

The simplicity of this approach seems to me to be a very appealing solution to this problem. This solution also doesn’t lock you in forever to a fixed quota. Instead, if the number of students making it to ISEF or STS who based their project on research lab experience rises, then the allocation of awards for non-research lab based students would simply go down. So, this allows the bar to be raised, but provides a more just system of rewards at these events. When I broached the topic of the research lab students winning almost all the awards, one person from Wyoming spoke up and said they had been bringing students to ISEF for over 10 years, and their students had not won a single award.

2) If suggestion #1 is not adopted, then adjust the method of computing the scores for students to provide an extra “handicap” score that is added to the scores of the non-research lab students

You could figure out how big the handicap should be by figuring up the mean score of all non-research lab students in one year and subtracting that mean from the man score of all research lab students. With this handicap system in place, students could still work in a research lab without being penalized, but students who did not use a research lab would have a fighting chance of winning an award.

3) Have Intel or Society for Science set up a nationwide system of research opportunities and research scientists who are willing to provide mentoring and an internship to students who meet the program’s qualifications for participating.

In addition, several research scientists could be assigned to each state, and could travel around to the various schools in their area to provide assistance and oversight to the students who want to do scientific research, or perhaps teach a regularly scheduled class at various schools on “scientific research”.

4) At the ISEF meeting I mentioned, there were some comments about how the logistics of running separate award systems would be difficult. I don’t see that it is a problem – if ISEF can handle team contestants, they should be able to handle this percentage-based award system.

5) If the percentage allocation of rewards is not implemented, then serious consideration should be given to requiring that the research conducted by a student working in a research lab or under the supervision of a mentor with a Master’s or Doctorate be done in some other field than the specialty of the research lab or the degreed mentor. The idea behind this is that it would remove entirely the chance that the student is just copying the research in the lab and not doing the project on their own. The research advisor should be able to give overall guidance to such a student in some other area than the one the researcher has a specialty in, but it would almost necessitate that the student play a very active role in their project. The student should still be able to participate with the lab’s on-going research, but this makes sure the student is not just repackaging the lab‘s work as their own.