Scandal at America's top science fair
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There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to differentiate between these different projects.
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.
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.
Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Derby_(South_Park)
[2] https://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/oki0th/south-park-...
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.
English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.
I completely agree with your point about a "Germanic language" but I disagree about "a German language".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_dialects#Eastern_Yiddi...
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).
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.
https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/koronawirus-gigantyczne-rozb...
"If you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from your own family."Some of the other projects that I saw were just amazing. Even if the parents didn't help many of the top projects involved thousands of dollars of equipment that most students had no access to.
And no, other than maybe $100 from my parents, they didn't help at all.
It seems so sad that we're taking projects that would be real fun---like yours---and comparing them to projects that clearly required massive amounts of infrastructure and external expertise. Now, again, both kinds of projects have their place: one to let students do genuine science, and the other for students to get an exposure to university research labs.
Why again are we turning science fairs into competitions and handing out awards and using them to filter college admissions? How many science fair entries report on failed experiments or admit that they didn't obtain statistically significant results? The whole thing reeks of misplaced incentives.
I'd count out little dixie cups of 100 popcorn kernels each. Then I would weigh them and put them all in the laundry room, where the humidity was pretty constant for different time periods over a few months. I took another set of batches and heated them up in the oven for different periods of time. Then re-weigh to see how much moisture was lost from the kernels. Seeing that the amount of unpopped kernels and volume was pretty consistent between the fast drying and slow drying allowed me to predict what it might be like for years old popcorn by really drying out the kernels. I also did some batches in a high humidity environment using a box with a humidifier and seeing the weight gain from the moisture.
Everything was popped in an air popper to give everything that was going to pop the time to pop. Then count the unpopped kernels!
The overall conclusion is popcorn is probably good for up to a year, and you can do a lot better than the microwave bags if you buy loose popcorn. Generally more moisture helped, but there was a sweet spot range where there's enough moisture to have the steam make it pop big and open, but too much humidity made the casing soft and it would have just a kernel that was cracked but didn't pop.
The hardest part was coming up with a precision scale that could do two digits of precision. Basically everyone that used them then were either drug dealers or people who bought actual lab equipment.
Thank you for coming to my popcorn ted talk.
Oh and I forgot, this was when I was in 5th grade. Good times.
It may also manifest in microwaves which "Popcorn" settings (well, when it's not a fraudulent feature) where monitoring moisture changes can help detect when a bad is done. (The fall-off in popping noises being another metric.)
> it's really not that hard to do it yourself
> could emailed prof after prof
Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."
It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.
My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?
Because 10 years back, the homework load, as expressed by the post high-school students I was hanging around with, was significantly lower than in some other European countries.
I was always told: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of leisure. Sure, you have eating and commuting etc. But people nowadays have to take those 5+ hours attention they're giving away from somewhere.
I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.
> That's some serious amount of time
It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.
Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?
And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?
Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible.
Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it.
Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia.
Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media.
It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.
That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win.
TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.
In Europe? At least around here, in post-Soviet states, 10 years ago is about the time the first generation of people, who experienced the "good school -> good university -> good job" phenomenon on themselves, had kids reaching school age. The rat race is barely picking up steam over here; we're lagging a couple decades of social "progress" compared to our Western counterparts.
At least in North America, this has massively changed within a generation. By a lot. Virtually all of my social circle got help at a young age to buy big houses from their parents. Parents support kids for much longer. Kids live with their parents much longer.
So yeah, the parents are now always there for people my age (mid 20s).
You ready to let them mess up their future, in the name of not being called an helicopter parent?
Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.
This kid plagiarized & had serious research misconduct. The fact that he has connections via his sister & dad is not the problem imo.
when did the definition of 'mistake' change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.
i don't mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn't be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he's a teenager, but let's not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.
Therefore anything they do that is bad is a mistake.
Pai's mistake was _deciding_ to commit research fraud, and then doing it.
Getting on that Boeing jet was a huge mistake.
The worst mistake I ever made was voting for Trump.
Having an intern give him a blowjob was the biggest mistake of Clinton's career.
In all of those cases the action was done on purpose. You are confusing the definition of mistake with the phrase "by mistake", i.e. "I ran rm -rf by mistake", which means unintentionally.
It didn't change, it's always been that way.
From Google search: > an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong. > Example: "coming here was a mistake"
If you think this is an unfortunate way to raise a child — in that kind of overly competitive environment – then there is a lot of blame to go around. The difficulty of getting into a UC school being an obvious place to start.
its obvious that there is competition to get to top school. So, it is question of setting expectation to get there and not necessary difficulty (which is natural and given)
About 2 weeks before the city science fair I realized my error (none of my teachers had said anything).
So in an attempt to lose, I made my backboard as bad as possible. I didn’t use scissors or glue, I just tore the paper and used masking tape.
Long story short, I have no idea how, but despite my best efforts, I won the city science fair including an HP-48 graphing calculator and a trip to the state science fair.
At the state science fair my backboard (you had to use the same one as the city contest) was mocked by much more studious 8-year olds. I found out that teachers weren’t allowed in the exhibition hall so I just abandoned my space and went to the beach.
I did not win the state science fair.
In hindsight, obviously there was a lot I could’ve done differently.
Also, I didn’t know what a null hypothesis was then. TBH I still don’t!
I remember I was sitting next to a girl who had an amazing project. At the end of the day they called her name for 2nd place and I remember thinking, “Wow, who beat her?!” And then they call my name…
I thought it was either all a mistake or that maybe the judges thought I was mentally challenged on account of my backboard and it was a pity situation? In hindsight, perhaps an emperor has no clothes situation where everybody sees the error but nobody wants to be the first one to call it out?
Maybe he won’t outright get his admission rescinded, but I can’t see how a prestigious college is worth more than an intact reputation (I’m sure that without this award he still would’ve been accepted to a great community college at worst, and with his research internship assuming good AP scores, he may have even got into his top choice).
You are thinking that now because he was already caught. But when he decided to cheat he didn’t know he will be caught. Probably he either estimated the chanches of him it wrong. Thinking perhaps that he will do a better job with the cheating, or that nobody looks that hard. Or he assumed lower consequences. Perhaps assuming if they catch him they just won’t give him the award, as opposed to making a big deal out of it.
Indian society is unlike any other and cannot be simplified, even within the individual castes.
Of course I do not know this individual and their mindset concerning "motivations", but I find it very unlikely that these "mistakes" are due to entrenched group morays shared among poor/dalit castes.
A lot of people care about prestige and reputation at least as much as they care about money, especially people who have money. For many people being rich isn't enough, they also have to be seen as smart and successful.
Feels a bit like, "Hope this impresses the judges ... but not too much."
Like I imagine the way card counters in Vegas must feel. I want to win, but not so much I attract the attention of the pit bosses.
I seem to remember folks getting jailed/fired/fined for that.
Except, there's nothing I can do about it. Does making more people aware, that can't do anything about it, improve the situation? Or is awareness pointless because of how transient it is?
And, what if the next great filter isn't great, but a series of smaller exponential filters pulled into a tight timeframe by the advancement of technology?
I probably just need more sleep.
Uh, how do you so confidently say this? Do you have a crystal ball that can see into the future? You have no idea what the honest researchers might've gone on to accomplish in the future as a result of winning these competitions. One of them might literally change the world (including your life) for the better if they don't get discouraged along the way through witnessing fraudsters win like this. That's literally the point of these competitions -- to increase the chances of someone making a world-changing discovery or invention down the road. You should absolutely be angry if some of the brightest minds that could solve your current problems are actively being turned away from doing so.
Most of us crave justice porn, and only when I am feeling in my most generous, zen-like mood can I find fault in that.
How about you give them some time to go through the process?
I bet that even after all this, that kid will still be better off having cheated than not.
Anything you compete for except the “he was a good man” phrasing in obituaries, the cheaters usually get to have. Even if caught.
Not cheating outside of a few really heinous crimes such as murder (killing your science fair opponent wouldn’t be a winning strategy if caught) is an altruistic action.
Wow that's dark.
I can only imagine someone trying to justify cheating would say that.
Cheating on your spouse is okay? Not cheating on your spouse altruistic? That concept is alien to me. I don't understand someone having no self-respect or being completely numb to how others feel. I know some exist, but I can't comprehend.
If there's "winning" in life it's through living a good and happy life. Some time past our teenage years I think all but the most self-adsorbed people realize that being kind and respectful to others also contributes to our own happiness.
This probably won't happen in the future... because future competitors will learn from this mistake and know to run their image generation through AI so that their images are "novel"...
> Don't mentors have to sign off along the way? That part I don't get...
Can someone explain this? Is it plausible the mentors genuinely had no idea?
Maybe community service equivalent to 50,000.00 at federal minimum wage would sort him out.
For a 17 years old, even throwing together such work is already an worthwhile result. Teens is a golden age of compilation and remixing.
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.
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.
I'd see some evidence.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Doing subpar work is not stealing. Come on, we've been through "intellectual property" already and now this.
aren't you affiliated with him somehow?
No! It wasn't. I'll bet no court will agree with you.
Next question.
Yeah, in the arts maybe, but not in the sciences.
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.
As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones. It’s weird to see tweets referring to participants as the “Indian guy” and “Chinese guy”. Or is that just me?
The people used to / raised in face cultures think this is normal and acceptable behavior (because: hey everyone else is doing this I should too - If I don't I will fall behind), whereas those from more "honest" cultures tend to despise the behaviour as it makes work less trustworthy and tends to give an unfair advantage. Notice how the reason for and against doing this is the same: unfairness.
Face cultures tend to embrace systemic unfairness as "fair" whereas non face cultures tend to call it as it is. What's interesting is that countries "with a face culture" tend to have higher levels of corruption and unfair business practices but also much higher levels of societal cohesion and trust. In other words, the more likely you are to save face the less likely you are to live in a democracy. And the less likely you are to trust institutions/organisations the more likely that they are trustworthy.
For the first bit, unfortunately that's hard to control and is actually talked about quite a bit (speaking as a HS student). I would be interested in alternative suggestions to limit these advantages, but I don't think it's realistically possible.
Noticed that as well. I feel like it has unfortunately become somewhat socially acceptable to be slightly racist against Indians and Chinese people due to a mix of politics and demographics in tech.
I think that's the only way to do it. The student must be able to describe the work they did. A fraudster might still get through with sufficient coaching.
Do we have a solution for this, and do we need a solution? Lets go nuts, lets go hyperbolic: should we ban kids from learning from their parents?
Click around on Karlstack some more.
The reason these people didn't check the claims is because they have an extremely strong culture of never checking any claims. If they did they might discover the claims were false, and then they might feel obliged to attack a colleague who realistically will be protected by their institution, and who might be a peer reviewer or even colleague in future. So, ignorance is bliss.
Perhaps this is an unpopular call but my personal opinion is that the whole idea of a "national scale" science project contest is irredeemably flawed and the correct answer is simply to discard it. It is a common flaw in thinking, often expressed by many commenters zealous to "correct" other people, that if you can't draw a bright sharp unarguable line between the various elements of a group of some sort that you can't claim the group "exists". This is nonsense; almost every practical grouping scheme will always have borderline cases or exceptions. But there does need to be some sort of actual grouping, or some sort of relatively objective way to sort and categorize the elements, that is accessible to the sorter. In this case, while from the objective divine perspective maybe we could create an objective standard for who got "too much help" to be qualified, there is no conceivable world in which the contest judges could ever get sufficiently accurate information to be presented with anything other than a very smooth gradation that they simply will have no handle to make a correct decision with. So the incentives will always be to get as much help as possible and then have human-intelligent agents doing their best to fool the human-intelligent judges, and that's just a hopeless situation.
Of course, the contest will not be shut down. But what can happen and what may well happen is that it will get more and more embroiled in controversy each year as the game-theoretic local optimum approach for the contestants each year becomes more and more to accuse their competition of being "too helped" and thus take out the competition until it is simply a farce. This is the worst game-theory case for cooperation; very limited repetition of plays by any given participant, most likely one, so no reason to care about the integrity of the contest for next year when they won't even be participating most likely.
What gets me, is there are clear scientific errors (talking about RNA fragments but should have been protein fragments).
This would have been immediately caught by someone with a basic knowledge of the field.
How do they judge the projects if not having subject matter experts closely review them and the results?
Too late for that. Very late. Unluckily his mind is set on pretending too much. Which is ubiquitous and actually encouraged in life to a great degree (not like this should be an excuse for adapting).
What is not late is to seek a different career in life. Be an influencer, praised youtuber or a political adviser perhaps, but the science world needs much different mindset. His reputation is annihilated by himself beyond repair anyway. The useful side of the story: be it a learning experience for the others.
This guy probably has a long and profitable career as a scientist ahead of him.
He will definitely have a fruitful career in a science leadership position, possibly not only in China.
Scary examples. Scary. It is increasinlgy benefitial to live life with a great deal of ignorance just to feel worthwhile getting out of the bed in the morning and put one tiny straw into the big haystack of the humanity, while others put it on fire all the time for their own personal warmth.
Fabrication discovered in prominent Alzheimer's research: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
"Sleuths" uncovering fraud and getting retractions for thousands of papers: https://apnews.com/article/danafarber-cancer-scandal-harvard... and https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-sharp-eyed-... and https://retractionwatch.com/2022/07/22/papers-in-croce-case-...
So I'm dismayed but not surprised that the incentives driving fraud in research science are trickling down into pre-college science fairs. A cynical person might conclude that we're just training the next generation of scientists to be better at fraud.
ISEF was an amazing experience, especially as a kid from a school that was nothing special. Our school was so excited that they hired a public speaking specialist to work with me to prepare. Looking back, that training in public speaking directly contributed to many successes in my career decades down the line. Plus the experience of going to ISEF still brings back positive memories. I never felt like I belonged - there were some amazingly smart kids there - but the social camaraderie and the ability to meet kids that thought it was cool to be smart was eye opening.
As far as "making mistakes when you're 17" - yeah, I made mistakes then too, but I certainly paid the price for them. Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify, if these allegations can be proven. There should be serious consequences for this.
To earn $55,000...
We should definitely expect to see short, brilliant discoveries from teenagers when they notice a gem in a heap of data adults discarded.
But not that kind of bureaqucratic nightmare style scientific papers where the result is attained mostly through prespiration, not inspiration. 100% great for already learned and paid adults, being fraud or exploitation of adolescents.
See also $50,000 prize money for what's called a "Spelling Bee": Asking children to spell words correctly.
I feel so far removed from understanding that culture that I feel like I can't criticize it.
It orients the entire USA public education system around training sociopathic behavior into teenagers.
We tell young people the best way to get ahead in life is through exaggerating. Then we train them to do it in their college essays and extracurriculars.
Gross.
And for most desirable institutions just outright auction for certain amount of spots. Let the rich bid for spot and the money spend to subsidise others.
this is called international students
There are so many measurable long-term benefits to higher education both for the individual as well as the state that it's truly insane (to me any at least) with how unaccessible we've let it become.
Agreed but surely we could come up with a form of competition more fair than something which heavily favors the wealthy and/or familial alumni.
The core issue is the pyramid shaped system where not being at one of these super places means that you are out of the competition for best work in general.
Do you want only rich kids going to college?
The system now is far more geared towards sending only rich kids to college than any national testing and admissions system would be.
If your parents are rich and have are around and can provide excellent schools, nutrition, love and care, pay for extra-curricular activities etc, you are far more likely to end up being "smart" and "have discipline" than someone who grows up in a family where parents are absent, they have to go to an inner city school, they can't afford school trips, instruments, extra-curricular activities, since they have to have a part time job themselves to make ends meet.
My point is, that SO many of the qualities we think that somehow kids got "innately" are actually purely products of luck and circumstance. The ability to "work hard" isn't a gift some are born with and some are born without, it's learned and modeled from our lives, parents, teachers, experiences etc.
If you never have parents that buy you books and encourage you to read, it's doubtful you will end up being "smart"
My point was, people love to imagine world where smart and discipline is mutually exclusive with "parents paying tutor" or other rich person perk. ImAnd if parents pay those, kid must be lazy or stupid.
It is not so. Even super entitled kid can be smart and work hard. If rich entitlement is just another advantage and so is tutor. Poor kids can be as smart as hardworking too, just without additional advantages.
Plsu, some people are not smart or hard working due to genetics. And damm they can be rich too.
Sure, there are poor kids from bad backgrounds who, against all odds, end up doing well. But these are outliers. In general, coming from rich families who throw money into your education, tutors, therapy, extra-curricular activities etc, is a MASSIVE advantage, and as such, one of the highest predictors of ending up at a prestigious college and high paying job is how wealthy your parents are...
Standardized testing is a good predictor. In my country people are admitted based on standardized testing only (country wide subject exams and sat-like test) or results of university-adjacent "preparation courses" and it works fairly well. The affirmative action is realized directly as a bonus points to your scores based on the background, which reduces the effect of ethical gaming.
A merit lottery also keeps everybody from having to waste shitloads of time studying for this one test.
Which prompts all sorts of interesting ideas like, why don't we have more prestigious universities? Did we decide that there was only so much science that needed done? Or were we trying to put a protective moat round the children of the elites so they didn't need to compete? And then put all our energies into ensuring our kid scraped into the bottom rung of that protected elite and didn't end up on the scrap heap?
Legacy families need prestigious universities to be rare and exclusive so that them having gone there increases in value. They already know that their kids will get in so making top universities more exclusive only has benefits for them.
Depends what you mean by "prestigious universities". If you mean "one of the N best schools in the country" then per definition you cannot create more prestigious universities. If you mean universities capable of offering really high quality education to undergrads, then there are already very many 'unprestigious' universities that are every bit as good as the prestigious ones and in many cases probably a lot better.
I guess what is needed is some sort signal that, while this university doesn't have as many Nobel laureates as Stanford, it is every bit as good at teaching undergraduate physics. I wish there was a university ranking that only focused on the quality of the undergraduate teaching and education, but I have no idea how that would be done.
'What's the hurry, son?'
Besides, this behavior deserves shaming, revoking of their prize, and maybe even legal repercussions. A 17 year old is practically an adult in many jurisdictions, and if they're doing this at that age, they will only continue to commit fraud later. Ethics should be learned early on in life, and a 17 year old should know better. Let this be a lesson.