[tomcam]

> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.

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.

[WillPostForFood]

We are family friends with a Chinese national who did pretty well in this year's ISEF. They spent last summer back in mainland China at a private science fair camp where they prepped and prebuilt most of their project for the year. They are very bright, did a ton of real work, but had a large paid team behind them supporting and helping. They almost could have professional and amateur divisions at this point.

[vsnf]

> Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities.

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.

[neilv]

The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars.

Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.

[tromp]

As featured in South Park episode "Pinewood Derby" [1] [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Derby_(South_Park)

[2] https://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/oki0th/south-park-...

[esdf]

Also a (not south park) movie! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Derby

[ToucanLoucan]

Do you need to have a child to get in on the parents segment of your cub scout's pinewood derby race? Asking for a friend.

[neilv]

I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)

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.

[jszymborski]

That's frankly an amazing way to stem the number of enthusiastic parents doing their kid's projects. I wouldn't have thought of it.

[alfalfasprout]

Yep and this is a big problem. Because while the fraud in this article was clear cut… in many other cases there can be significant misrepresentation about the student’s actual novel contributions.

[anal_reactor]

Unfortunately, many cultures don't see honesty as a value on its own. In Polish there's a word "frajer" which is an offensive term for someone who got cheated or didn't take advantage of a situation. The logic is that, if the society as a whole is dishonest, then it doesn't make sense to be a martyr recognized by no-one, and it's better to make sure you take care of yourself first.

[nsajko]

Fun fact: that's actually a Yiddish word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frajer

English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

[eigenket]

Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.

[tokai]

Yiddish is a German language.

[eigenket]

Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.

[gumby]

What tokai said was OK: English is also classified as a Germanic language even though it includes a lot of French words, not to mention Hindi etc.

For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.

[phreeza]

Similar word also exists in standard German, where it originally meant "f*cker" but now just means a man who buys services from a prostitute.

[rurban]

Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then

[phreeza]

No it more likely comes from archaic "freien", which still is used for "to marry" but used to mean something slightly different ;)

[fransje26]

They still use a variant of that word in Dutch: vrijen. With the old meaning.. ;)

[verisimi]

Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.

[alex-korr]

The word is widely used in Russian as well.

[azherebtsov]

Reminds me about covid time math competition. It had to be taken online. Usually maximum score can be reached by less than a dozen of students, but when competition was online there were over 3000 math geniuses

https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/koronawirus-gigantyczne-rozb...

[ggambetta]

Unfortunately very similar to Uruguay, where I grew up. One of the many reasons I haven't lived there for a while now :(

[piva00]

To pile on top: also pretty similar to Brazilian culture where following the rules will be looked down as being stupid (since everyone else isn't abiding by them, you doing it is considered as self-handicapping).

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.

[fransje26]

In Czech Republic, under communism, they used to say:

    "If you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from your own family."

[UncleMeat]

Many many years ago I participated in a national history competition and went to nationals. The participants were almost entirely white, and there was absolutely this "well its obvious the parents didi this" thing there too.

[strikelaserclaw]

due to growing up in cut throat dog eat dog culture, a lot of people from asia don't really teach their kids about ethics and morality even whilst living in western societies, many times they encourage the opposite.