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

DEET
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:13:37 +0000

Even if nothing is done regarding the awards being given out in proportion to the entries from research lab students and non-research lab students, I have some other suggestions for improvement, and they are given below:


All student research reports, both at STS and ISEF, should be checked for plagiarism including having them run through some automatic plagiarism checking software, especially making sure to compare to other papers from the lab.
The research scientist in charge of the research lab should be required to submit to the Society for Science all published papers that have been done at the lab in any area that is related to the student’s project. The researcher should also be required to identify which of the published research papers from the lab is the closest in content to the student’s research paper.
For ISEF, both the student’s research paper and any published papers from the research lab should be provided before the ISEF meeting to the judges in the category the student entered in to give the judges more time to review the material.
You should not have the student’s names listed on the research paper for the STS. Having the name listed opens the door for those judges who may want to modify their scoring either favorably or unfavorably because of some knowledge about the student.
Anyone that provided help during the project should have their names listed on the STS research paper and at the display booth at ISEF. The argument I’ve heard as to why this is not done now is that it prevents the judges from being swayed one way or another just based on the reputation of the researcher. What I see happening at ISEF, though, is that by prohibiting other names in the display, the person viewing the project is given the erroneous impression that the student did all this work on their own.

. There is no audit trail on the judging at ISEF or STS (at least none that I have ever seen that are made available to the public). Having no audit trail, anything can be done to the calculations. At a minimum, copies of the score sheets of the judges (perhaps with the names of the judges and the names of the students removed) should be made available. The computer program that is used to make the calculations should also be made available, so that any interested party can verify for themselves that there was nothing fishy.