> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.
Said with kindness and discretion.
Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities. It has been for decades. I know firsthand that many Chinese-born parents don't even view it as at all wrong.
We are family friends with a Chinese national who did pretty well in this year's ISEF. They spent last summer back in mainland China at a private science fair camp where they prepped and prebuilt most of their project for the year. They are very bright, did a ton of real work, but had a large paid team behind them supporting and helping. They almost could have professional and amateur divisions at this point.
> Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities.
This has been a meme/running gag in countless sitcoms and Sunday morning newspaper comic strips for as long as I can remember. Not the Asian community part, just the 'parents actually doing the work' part. The joke is typically about overly competitive middle class suburban fathers juxtaposed against their children who have better things to do than care about dorky school projects.
The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars.
Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.
I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)
If you wanted to organize some competitions in your city, the track I saw would be easy to build. You might want to design it to break down for storage in someone's garage, and to fit in the back of a couple SUVs. Maybe get city approval to host events as a block party or at a park. Or pre-arrange to donate it to a parish that hosts Scouts and has room to store it and occasionally set it up in their school gym or coffee&donuts hall.
Today, you also have more RC vehicle competitions, and (over-media-ified) generations of battling homebrew robots.
Yep and this is a big problem. Because while the fraud in this article was clear cut… in many other cases there can be significant misrepresentation about the student’s actual novel contributions.
Unfortunately, many cultures don't see honesty as a value on its own. In Polish there's a word "frajer" which is an offensive term for someone who got cheated or didn't take advantage of a situation. The logic is that, if the society as a whole is dishonest, then it doesn't make sense to be a martyr recognized by no-one, and it's better to make sure you take care of yourself first.
Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.
Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.
It developed from High German with elements of Aramaic and Hebrew, in the area we would now call west Germany. The only way it's not a German language is if you deny the historic and linguistic roots of the language.
It did not develop exclusively from high German, as I wrote before and it was geographically widespread enough for clear Eastern vs Western dialects to emerge:
Rather than existing "in the area we would now call west Germany" as you would like to believe for some reason. Eastern Yiddish in particular is much more than "a German language" (unless you want to call Polish a German language as well).
Reminds me about covid time math competition. It had to be taken online. Usually maximum score can be reached by less than a dozen of students, but when competition was online there were over 3000 math geniuses
To pile on top: also pretty similar to Brazilian culture where following the rules will be looked down as being stupid (since everyone else isn't abiding by them, you doing it is considered as self-handicapping).
One of my least favourite features of Brazil and definitely in the top 3 reasons why I left the country more than a decade ago.
Many many years ago I participated in a national history competition and went to nationals. The participants were almost entirely white, and there was absolutely this "well its obvious the parents didi this" thing there too.
due to growing up in cut throat dog eat dog culture, a lot of people from asia don't really teach their kids about ethics and morality even whilst living in western societies, many times they encourage the opposite.
Said with kindness and discretion.
Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities. It has been for decades. I know firsthand that many Chinese-born parents don't even view it as at all wrong.