<p>@Falcon, the Olympiads are meant to be administered by schools. If a kid can’t get the school on board, there isn’t any way to participate. </p>
<p>Research projects are a different matter, but still, there is a huge advantage for kids who get school support, especially from staff who are experienced with the expectations of these fairs. Professional scientists depend on one another for advice and peer review. It’s a very rare high school student who will be able to think up and complete a project of any value without school support and significant input from a good mentor. I’m not saying it’s not worth trying, because I think success there is the most impressive thing a student can do. </p>
<p>When I visited our local science fair some years ago, it was dominated by two types of project: the vast majority had clearly been done by kids with little to no mentoring, and generally, were not very good. Then there were a few that had clearly been done with heavy guidance in a college lab. My problem with those was just that I didn’t get any sense that the student had really initiated the project, more like just walked in and been a pair of hands in something that someone else had thought up and planned out in detail before the student ever showed up. Yes, it took hard and careful work to make the project happen, but there’s no way that project came out of the student’s own ideas, the student merely seemed to be serving as an unpaid technician.</p>