The Science Fair requires a research project produced by a student is a very competitive event. The competition clearly favors students with resources, experience (or access to experience) and demands significant effort by every participant. Some will win. Many will be discouraged. The science fair experience offers all opportunities to display initiative, character, persistence and competitiveness while developing skills that will serve them throughout a lifetime.
It is hard to overstate the impact of this event on the lives of those who pour effort into their project. I have spoken with engineers, physicists who discuss a high school science project forty years earlier with great enthusiasm. Science students do win scholarships, awards and gain recognition otherwise not possible on the athletic field, as a star on the stage or as a student government representative. I have seen young lives transformed by taking part in regional, state and international science fairs. In my experience there is no science event (classroom or extracurricular) during the high school years that can have the impact of the "Science Fair".
The "Science Service" (formed by a journalist E. W. Scripps in 1921) spawned science clubs and activities focused on public experiences in science. In 1942 the "Science Talent Search" was established by the Science Service and Westinghouse with the purpose to encourage talented students to pursue a career in science or engineering. The "Science Fair" of today is guided by the standards of the "Science Talent Search" and now accepts science projects from around the world through a network of local, regional, state and nationally organized hubs.There are two distinct classes of the many awards, scholarships, prizes and recognitions at the competition. Science Fair category awards in subject categories (such as Chemistry or Botany) are selected by judges associated with the Science Fair (and normally handed out on Saturday morning). Special awards are granted by numerous societies and institutions with particular interests at every level of the Science Fair network. "Conservation Clubs" may select the best project with an environmental focus. The military selects projects with applications relating to the military mission. Associations of doctors and dentists may offer awards relating to medical and dental health issues. These representatives from these associations may have no contact with judges associated with the fair It is therefore possible to win special awards but not win official "Science Fair Awards". It is also possible that a project win a "Science Fair" category award but win no special awards at all. It is often happens that high quality projects garner both the Science Fair category awards and numerous special awards. The winnings can become significant and even substantial with each level of science fair competition offering a new set of prizes, cash awards and college scholarships.
Judging many dozens of science fair projects uniformly in a 4-24 hour window is the most amazing feat of the science fair. Individual projects can have a huge amount of data, extensive logs over many months of effort, research papers, advanced mathematical and statistical operations and pages and pages of programming code printed out for review. A judge with 3-5 hours of available time may be asked to review 5-50 projects. The time factor (in judging) is huge and so a number of techniques are used to reduce the judging load. Projects can be "red flagged" or stricken from the judging list because required forms are incorrectly filled out, the size of the display board is wrong or some policy is violated. Removing projects from the list of those being evaluated allows judges to focus time on other project. Projects can be eliminated quickly when, without the presence of a mentor, a casual conversation reveals a lack of project knowledge. Insufficient or incoherent research, deficient logs and data that fails to support the conclusions of the project all allow for a judge to quickly move on to another project. Rapid judging has the impact of favoring those project displays with visual appeal and participants than present themselves well and are fluent in articulating the project.
Many winning projects are variations of topics done in previous years and so the research reports that accompany the projects can become quite extensive (20-300 pages). Forms from previous years, seemingly difficult to complete in the past, are dated and signed again for a similar project. The project display board is redone and improved. The mastery of the content shared during interviews with the judges become more evident with each year of investigation in a similar content. When the confidence of the participant grows so does the ability of the participant to articulate the purposes, procedures, findings and implications of the project. Experience, or access to experience, can have a huge impact (as it does in most academic competitive events).
Participants may have different degrees of mentoring available to them and this can be the single biggest difference between the outstanding project and the winning project. One student (from a school I worked at) had a mother who was a commercial artist. Her project display board with colored stage lights discreetly highlighted an surreal professional display. Her father was a research professor who was published extensively and often had his daughter with him on a research vessel during the summer months. She was well versed and understood her project and was very articulate. She did her project but had significant assistance. The project, redone over three years, garnered over a dozen scholarships and many awards. The mentoring, guiding, tutoring, advising and constructive critique of her parents was an asset that not every science fair participant has (or could ever have).
A casual walk down the row of science display boards can quickly reveal the huge disparity in available resources that support the project. Some students will spend well over a thousand dollars on a single project. Students may be in educational environments that have little or no available equipment. I have seen students who built computer cooling systems and bought computers and cooling systems just for the project (they won at the state and international levels.) Some students borrow the school equipment. Some students have little available funding and are at schools with sparse or dated equipment. Those who are able and willing to spend much more can spend much more. Funding can have a huge impact on the equipment, quality of the equipment and even on the display board hardware. There is no limit or budget to the Science Fair project so this becomes another factor that not every participant has access to.
Not all future scientists win at the Science Fair. I spoke with Russell Hulse, a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, about his Science Fair project (radio telescope) that never won. The lack of mentoring, resources and his personal admission that the display board never looked as good as others meant that his project fell short year after year. He does report that he learned more from his projects than he did in the science class. Each day he looked forward to the end of school so he could go home and work on his latest science project.
The Science Fair is not fair and I am certain that no can ever make it fair with more rules. The science fair has winners who never win and that is the strength of the experience. The winners are those who generate projects and research with noble purposes, with genuine curiosity, with personal investment while displaying the persistence and effort.
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Please note that the views expressed here by me do not represent the views of McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, Archdiocese of Mobile or any part of the Universal Catholic Church.
