Recently, the list of winners of the "39th Shanghai Adolescents Science and Technology Innovation Contest" was announced, and some netizens pointed out that certain winning works "reached the level of master's and doctoral students." In response, the Shanghai Association for Science and Technology, one of the organizers, stated that it has launched an investigation to verify the matter. According to The Beijing News, in recent years, the projects of numerous primary and secondary school science and innovation competitions have been questioned as being ghostwritten by adults.

Just how competitive are science and innovation competitions for primary and secondary school students? Monte Carlo methods, surface electromyography, chip integration, machine vision... Among the winning projects, there are many keywords that even college graduates find unfamiliar. It cannot be ruled out that some participating students are genuinely gifted, but for the works of teenagers to collectively reach the level of master's and doctoral students is still beyond imagination. Investigations have found that in many primary and secondary school science and innovation competitions, traces of adults are obvious: some parents engaged in scientific research step in themselves, and some training institutions provide one-stop services from experiments to reports. In these competitions, the link in which children are most involved is, astonishingly, having their names attached.

In such science and innovation arenas, what is actually being competed for is the parents' resources—no different from "competing on one's father." The original purpose of youth science and innovation competitions is to sow the seeds of scientific research in children's hearts. Excessive adult intervention, and even fraud in competitions, is no different from pulling up seedlings to help them grow—it both undermines the meaning of the competition and harms its fairness. What is more, it invisibly sends children a signal: as long as you hold resources, you need not make efforts yourself.

Ghostwriting in science and innovation competitions has an industrial chain, which ultimately comes down to demand from parents. The Ministry of Education has repeatedly stressed that fraudulent participation such as parents or others doing the work on behalf of students must be resolutely prevented; it has also repeatedly reiterated that the results of competitions must not be used as a basis for admission to primary and secondary schools or as bonus points for the college entrance examination. However, some parents, out of anxiety about school admission, would rather believe it exists than not and blindly follow the crowd; others, out of a worship of honors, desperately "push their children" for fear that they will lose at the starting line. This mentality is reflected in science and innovation competitions, leading parents either to directly tutor their children on their projects or to directly do the work for them and engage in rampant fraud.

In recent years, cases of parents manipulating their children's projects and meeting with disaster in science and innovation competitions have occurred repeatedly. In 2015, a middle school student in Anhui won multiple provincial and national awards for the invention of a "portable device for rapid identification and detection of haze pollution gases," but it was later revealed that the student's father was the president of a research institute and that the research results of father and son were highly similar. In 2020, a sixth-grade student in Yunnan won third prize at the 34th National Adolescents Science and Technology Innovation Contest for a paper on rectal cancer, which was later verified to be the research results of the student's parents. More notably, all of these competitions that "blew up" were on the white list published by the Ministry of Education. This shows just how lax the review and awarding process in science and innovation competitions can be.

To return primary and secondary school science and innovation competitions to the children, parents need to let go of their obsessions, and, more importantly, the organizers need to tighten their review. Fakes will never become real; fraud by parents and institutions cannot be flawless. Competition organizers should strengthen verification of participants' identities and works—whether through on-site defenses or repeated experiments—first distinguishing the genuine from the fake, and then determining excellence. In fact, many science and innovation competitions have already made identifying adult traces in works an indicator, asking children how they came up with their topics, whether they encountered difficulties, whether their papers have flaws, and what their future directions are. It is easy for judges to tell whether an adult is merely an off-field coach or an on-field player.

When it comes to scientific research and innovation, what matters most is seeking truth from facts. This concept should be passed on to children from an early age.