Science Fair Evaluation: Fill & Download for Free

A2A: Being from a foreign school is not a disadvantage per se. We try to fairly evaluate the quality of each school, specifically in the relevant areas of computer science. A large fraction of our students admitted for the PhD are foreign — in fact, in some departments it’s a large majority.

I don't have much experience about this topic, but for the past two years I have volunteered at the middle school near my university's Science Fair, and I have to decide which projects move forward, do an evaluation of some of the kids (I get a list of names), and basically put in my two cents on who had the single best and most advanced project. Honestly, every year there are so many cool projects and some dumb ones, but it is such a pain in the butt to have to judge science projects from parents. Every year, eight or ten of the fifty projects in my section are done entirely by parents. It is not hard to tell. And even though some of the projects are really interesting, when those kids are in my section I never recommend that they move forward. Last year, one student made a magnet out of conductors and resistors, which was pretty cool, but this kid was in sixth grade. I ask him "What do your parents do for work?" and he responds that both his parents are engineers, and his mom had come up with the idea for the project. Looking closer at the words on his project and the way "he" had the circuit structured, it was easy to tell his mom had done the majority, if not all, of the work on his project. The typed up report included words like circumvent and superceed, as well as a plethora of engineering terms not used by sixth graders. It was really sad to have to put him back, as the project was well cool, but he hadn't done any of the work on it.Also, his dad was at the science fair, and when he heard his son wasn't moving onto the regional science fair, he demanded to know who had judged him. He was yelling and quite upset about it, and when his kid pointed me out to him he demanded an older and "wiser" judge reevaluate. I calmly explained the situation to him, and he backed off right away, but it was really scary to have this tall man yelling at me for not accrediting his wife's work. Parents now a days are obsessed with their kids succeeding, whether or not it's on their own merit, and they are more likely to think it's the teacher's fault when something goes wrong than the kids. Knock it off. The teachers know what they're doing, your kid is the one who doesn't. Gordon Bennett.

My biggest surprise is that no more girls go into this field. It is perfect for girlsyou can work from home,you can work in almost any area you like,no need for physical strength.There is the wonderful WiML conference, which I strongly recommend. I organize challenges, which are fair evaluations, hoping more girls will join because it is an environment free of gender bias. But few girls like this kind of "games".Computer science in general does not attract so many females, which is surprising to me. Maybe it is because computers are mostly made for male tastes as dark stern appliances. I bought an orange cover for mind to make it look prettier.I failed attracting my own daughter, though she has all the required skills. She was even attracted to statistics early on: at age 8 she did a science fair project in which she analyzed the influence of the proportion of ingredients in cup cakes on taste in a pretty extensive survey study she conducted and analyzed with Excel. But she thinks music and biology are more interesting. What can I do...But maybe it is the expectations on male students that generates the bias and not the other way around: society puts more pressure on male students who are gifted in math and science to pursue a technical career than on female students, because they are still perceived as bread winners. One of my teacher at engineering school blamed me and other girls to take the place of male students because we would end up hanging our diplomas in our kitchens, according to him. Needless to say that this was a great motivation for me and my female colleagues to prove him wrong. Even though I worked from home to devote enough time to my family, I never stopped working. "Reverse psychology" is maybe the answer!