Congratulations to all of the finalists, and to all of those who participated in the competition, whether finalists or not! I think this program is very worthwhile.
One aspect of this that bothers me a little, though: the 97 finalists come from just 20 states–mostly the usual suspects. I do not think that these states have a lock on “smart people,” nor a lock on “hard-working people,” but it seems to me that there is some inequality of opportunity that is reflected in the list of finalists. Of course, there will be regions within the favored states where there is less opportunity than in other regions within those states. The geographic concentration is probably more extreme than the 20/50 fraction represents.
I live in NYS, but in a suburban area with little resources - getting on the semi-finals list living in NYS is incredibly difficult! There are people with a lot of opportunities, mainly in NYC or near Brookhaven.
That’s why, when they stop considering location, there tend to be a disproportionate amount from places like NY.
lol, blossom, no, it’s hardly the first time I noticed the inequality of educational opportunities! This was just more extreme than I thought, to shut out students from 30 of the states at the Siemens finalist level. I did not anticipate that concentrated a geographic distribution. There are serious scientific resources that are potentially available to high school students in many of the states with no finalists. So it’s not just a question of access to a high-quality education, nor high-level research nearby–there seems to be another component to the opportunity, perhaps in terms of the educational structures in place.
If you look at the previous list of semi-finalists, the degree to which they are concentrated at certain high schools is even more obvious. Some schools are virtual factories for certain competitions.
Public transportation or a stay at home parent; a school science teacher who thinks that science is more than teaching what’s in the book which will be on the test; a HS culture which supports work-arounds on scheduling (i.e. being able to leave early to meet with the lab team even if it means missing a mandatory drug counseling session; parents who support hands-on learning even it comes at the expense of traditional “doing homework” at night, etc.
Getting involved in research involves so much infrastructure. Easy to do in some parts of the country; near impossible in others.
@consolation Some schools are virtual factories for certain competitions
you are certainly right on with that. If your high school is not set up to support you in this venture the odds are certainly not in your favor - or you may not even be aware of the competition, requirements, deadlines etc. There are schools who integrate this competition into their curriculum and they obviously are primed for success. I was not surprised to see that the semi-fnalists and finalist are predominantly Asian, it speaks to a cultural component of this competition as well
At a HS near me (not my own town) the list of 'mandatories" really precludes a talented kid from doing anything that doesn’t take place on or near campus. Truancy is bad- I get that- but you are brushing the entire student body very broadly if you don’t have a flexible attendance policy for kids doing academically relevant work that doesn’t take place at the HS. Transportation policies- can kids who are not varsity athletes take one of the vans or buses that are ferrying kids across the region every afternoon? Enrollment policies- can a kid who is a junior take the “independent study” class for science credit which is only available for seniors who have exhausted the curriculum?
This is why some schools look like factories. They’ve got a team of teachers (and in some cases, administrators) who think that out of the classroom, hands-on learning, is just as valuable as the state-mandated guidelines for graduation. They have flexible policies so they can create blocks of time for kids to work independently- what lab (even if it’s next door to a HS) wants kids who can only show up for 45 minutes at a time? They allow kids to opt out of gym (replacing it with a supervised work-out or something else if it’s needed for graduation) or allow kids to take the Civics final and score an A in lieu of a year long class memorizing the preamble to the Constitution.
For a variety of reasons (one of them being that people in academia tend to be aloof and absentminded), you have to be really savvy to have a competitive project for these contests. I personally was the child of a professor and had no idea of how to go about doing a project, and had a lot of expectations that weren’t realistic.
When our school decided that science research looked like a good idea, they consulted with one of the local factories to see how they did it. Students were groomed starting freshman year taking a class where they read about 19 science articles a week freshman year summarizing them. They started off at Scientific American level, but were expected to start reading more professional level stuff in their area of interest by the spring. That year culminated in a presentation of their area of interest and in the years after that they would find scientists to collaborate with. They met once a week during their lunch hour. I don’t know much about how the rest of it worked exactly because my kid bailed after a semester, saying he’d prefer to spend his time teaching himself about the Linux operating system, but not having to write papers and do presentations. Students got involved in various projects that I heard about and some pursued those interests into college and even grad school. We did produce a couple of Intel winners in the early years, but the teacher got sick and the program never had the same enthusiasm after that. The year my kid was involved the freshman science kids ended up making the core of the group that took the Science Olympiad team to the state competition for the first time which they thought was a lot more fun!
Any way a long winded way to say that I agree with Blossom - it helps to have a supportive school.
This looks like the beginning of another thread on the evils of a selected group getting more than its “fair share” with pressure to be applied to make the selected set of students mirror the population at large. So what would happen if Siemens used the electoral college numbers to assign quotas or set bars at different levels for each state? You’d then have people saying it’s wrong that it doesn’t reflect race/gender/city-suburb etc.
Quite often the “inequality of opportunity” is not so much the school, but families’ priorities which will manifest itself in kids from the same school performing very differently. How is one supposed to fix this? Forbid parents from influencing their kids in certain areas? Assigning a penalty or a bonus to a student’s work to factor in how much or how little support he got from his family, or easier still, based on the figures assigned to the school, the state, race, religion, gender, whatever, so that the outcome matches the population?
Dad- I don’t agree with your observation. I think I am pointing out that there’s no mystery that clusters of research-performing kids do not reflect the numbers of smart kids nationally. They tend to come from communities with great public transportation (rural kids at a distinct disadvantage unless they live in Ithaca or Urbana); they tend to come from communities where there is a critical mass of faculty/teachers in the HS willing to buck the administration or the district norms to get kids time for these projects; they tend to come from communities where there is at least a parent or two who can make introductions to the hospitals and labs to facilitate the exchange.
The parental influence is the least of it from what I’ve observed. A kid who is excited about science needs a teacher to figure out how to leverage that excitement, even if the parents are first gen immigrants who don’t speak English and have an 8th grade education.
My experience is diametrically the opposite. See the number of Asian names in the list. You really think the “factory” schools or “factory” cities have that percentage of us? At least for my kids and others from my ethnicity, the level of knowledge we could imparted through our organizations or at home was far higher than what we could expect in school (I’m talking about good schools). Google north south foundation - it is an example of an organization that has led to a very small minority to dominate the national spelling bee for the last decade.
Magnet schools like Thomas Jefferson are spectacular, but it isn’t practical even for good schools districts such as ours to have teachers who could conduct classes at that level, so the only practical way for DS and many of his peers to reach that level in contests like AMCs, AIME, etc was outside of school.
And as to getting kids excited about science, having it done by the family is a process that starts in elementary school and goes on with consistency.
The geographic distribution of semi-finalists of the Intel and Siemens contests are incredibly skewed, and something like 1 out of every 6 semifinalists for Intel are from Long Island, not including any parts of New York City. They are more overrepresented than the kids from Northern Virginia. In most academic contests, like USAMO for example, Long Island does not dominate so much. The geographic distribution of USAMO qualifiers is still skewed, but it’s not as bad as the high school research competitions.
In addition to having support from the school, it is helpful to have support from people knowledgeable about research. For whatever reason, people at SUNY Stony Brook are much more willing to give that support than people elsewhere. If you want a broader geographic representation, you’ll want to replicate their programs at other universities.
“And as to getting kids excited about science, having it done by the family is a process that starts in elementary school and goes on with consistency.”
I’d substitute “that starts at birth and goes on with consistency”.
" to shut out students from 30 of the states at the Siemens finalist level. "
Nope, not “shut out”. Go visit the football field. I think you’ll find some of them out there. Their choice of priorities. They went out the door when they were two. And their parents hit with them and blocked them and guarded them while kids learned how to run with the ball-and enrolled them in loads of wee-sports and summer programs. And purchased expensive equipment. This is not about not having resources. This is about choices made. This country overwhelmingly chooses to knock brains from the heads of their kids in sports like football rather than to steer them to science. Don’t blame the program. Thank the program. At least it existed and had hope–til now.
How significant is the Siemens awards for college application? One of my friends’ son got on the semifinalist list a few years ago, and he got into Stanford EA.