Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Can you provide any guidelines for judging a middle school science fair (or in general)?

This is my first experience as a judge & the school isn't providing any guidance to me until the day of the fair (!).

Thanks !

NewJudge wrote:Can you provide any guidelines for judging a middle school science fair (or in general)?

This is my first experience as a judge & the school isn't providing any guidance to me until the day of the fair (!).

Thanks !

I've done a few fairs, they're fun and rewarding although I've seen far too many judges criticizing ten-year olds for not understanding things like standard deviation and population genetics. That's not too fun to see, so keep that in mind when you're writing comments or interviewing kids.

Otherwise, you'll know it when you see it so don't sweat it too much- it'll be clear which ones are good and deserve more attention.

I've only judged a couple fairs at a single elementary school, and can't offer you much advice. In those instances we were given a quite thorough checklist and some details about what the students had been told, and judging was pretty straightfoward.

A couple things you might want to think about ahead of time and or bring up with the administrator or head judge:

1 - You may be asked to leave written comments for each project. Consider how you'll handle a case where someone has clearly put a lot of effort into a terrible project. I'm not talking about experiments which don't work or achieve unlikely results, but rather those which don't even begin to measure what it is they claim to measure. (Massive peer surveys used not to obtain statistics on responses but to determine the truth of factual statements though voting is a common example.) The great projects and the students who've obviously put no effort into the endeavor are comparatively easy to evaluate.

2 - What do you do if you suspect that most of the work on a project was done by a parent? They may offer some guidlines for you. In my case, the people in charge more or less refused to discuss the topic. I ended up giving students the benefit of the doubt and grading them entirely on the project results, on the grounds that punishing an exceptional student seems likely to do more damage than artificially praising someone with over-eager parents. (That isn't to say I'm entirely comfortable with that decision.) This may be less of an issue with older students.

3 - Find out what instructions the students received. Sometimes project elements which seem unnecesisary or out of place are the result of explicit rules rather than poor design on the students' part.

Take care,
Erik