> The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.

I am surprised that the organizers did not catch this, though I don't know enough to know how much time the organizers had.

> For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.

For kids, in general, if one kid makes a claim ("I made this," or "This game cartridge is mine") that turns out to be false, there is generally some sort of comeuppance. That could be as simple as the kid losing respect within their peer group, or it could be as serious as parents being informed about the kid commiting a petty crime.

This is important, because it instills society's values (such as they are) in the child. For example, what if kid A steals a game cartridge from kid B, and then kid B retaliates by shooting and killing kid A? That response is generally frowned upon, in most parts of the world.

In my opinion, it would be fine if "the child" was presenting a poster showing the current state of research in microbial recycling of plastics. That's a cool thing for a high school senior or college freshman to do. But to take existing research (stealing), manipulate images (lying), and cast it as their own work (stealing and lying), on a national stage, that requires an appropriate comeuppance.

My point, if you can't get adult professionals with wages admit they fk'd up, there's zero and even negative expectations of unpaid teenager contestants.

And that's what I am seeing happening right now.

You have unacceptable amount of leniency towards organizers, in "don't know how much time did they have". They should've had enough to scrutinize their short list. Perhaps it all looks like the winning submission.

17 year olds are of course fully responsible for their own academic claims and creations. You would get expelled from many high schools for much smaller cases of plagiarism.

Do you really get expelled from high school in the USA? Isn't that basically mandatory education? And for plagiarism?

I'd see some evidence.

Big difference between public and private schools. Getting expelled from a public school is pretty hard, you basically have to do something seriously illegal involving guns and/or drugs. Getting expelled from a private school is an entirely different thing. They can expel you for a lot of things, and basically anything that makes the school look bad in the eyes of prospective future 'customers' is high on that list. Especially among more prestigious schools.

I don't know, my anecdotes would be from a private school in Europe where a family member is a teacher. They take plagiarism seriously, but also can expel students a lot easier than public schools can.

The point being is that plagiarism at a known private school that you pay good money for and hope to rely on, is something you will give much more consideration than sending work to a science fair to see if it will stick to a wall or not.

Neither are particularly good behaviors, but as a "computer guy" I think your public-facing API (science fair admissions) should validate its inputs. There are people out there who send know malicious requests to endpoints, you know.

Instead of blaming an underage student I'd reevaluate all of their prior nominations. Chances of dragons being there.

I totally agree that the fair failed badly at validating the submissions.

> The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.

This is what I disagree with. A 17 year old is not an innocent child that mustn't be blamed. At this age (and already earlier too) there has to be real consequences for plagiarism, proportionate to the case.

Plagiarize coursework? Fail the course. Cheat in final exams? Fail the exams and retake the year. And so on.

So let him fail the science fair and probably be banned from entering this science fair and probably other ones if they're federated.

If that's not his first participation then the previous ones should also be reevaluated.

But that doesn't have much point since he's growing out of them already. And I don't think it's fair to pursue him further (other than existing bad publicity) since people do stupid things all the time and the idea of limited liability exists for a reason.

>The child is nothing to be blamed for, it is a 100% problem of the organizers.

If I,as a child, stole 50k USD, surely i would get thrown into the jail, or juvie.

>For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.

There's difference between remixing and outright stealing with intent to deceive, for monetary gain.

Even more so when one's under university tutelage, and comes from well off family - where 50k USD matters way less.

This case only became severe because they chose to award these money to compilated work with no attribution. If they didn't reward this specific work it would be a non-issue. So by induction blame lies on the offering part.

Doing subpar work is not stealing. Come on, we've been through "intellectual property" already and now this.

you are doing some heavy mental gymnastics right now. What he did was a crime, reward or not, and he should be old enough to understand why that was immoral and possible consequences of it.

aren't you affiliated with him somehow?

> What he did was a crime

No! It wasn't. I'll bet no court will agree with you.

Next question.

> Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.

Yeah, in the arts maybe, but not in the sciences.

You have enough life experience to know the difference. Do teens? Are you confident in that? Are you a child psychologist? Do you have any? How many papers did you publish?

I'm only saying you don't excuse it because they are teens.

If his project was just shoddy scientifically, that wouldn't be an issue. I'm sure 90% of the projects are like that. He committed deliberate fraud, stealing other people's work (including past kid winners!), and won 50k for it. That's not "throwing something together" it's deliberate cheating.

If they've already awarded him these $50k, congratulations and they should probably close the project down. They've failed basic validation of inputs before transferring $50k to a fradulent competitor.

You do not fail that hard by accident. It speaks of prolonged negligence and as I've said elsewhere, their whole portfolio needs to be rechecked.

As for research ethics, not everybody is a researcher and thus has the same ethic. For me the guys who get bogus computer-generated articles through reviews and into journals are genius, even though people with research background may see that as a violation. Tough life.