SSEF 2017: Message to authorities

Hi, I participated in SSEF 2017 with my project. However, I would like to share some observations that I had made that could suggest that the competition may have an error in the results.

  I have participated in several competitions with my project on Chemistry (Actual Code will not be revealed to maintain confidentiality. In all of these competitions, I have won the top awards. However, for SSEF, I had not even been awarded a single award.

  Later on in the Final Judging Round of SSEF, I have been judged by five judges with most of them reverting positive responses to me, just like the previous competitions. When I asked if they could provide any room for improvement to my poster or project, they said that they all could not provide any room for improvement as the entire project and analysis was already very impressive and 'exceeded their expectation of the capability of a JC student'. When the Prize Ceremony came for SSEF 2017, this project that had performed extremely well for other big national competitions could not even place and win any awards in Singapore. This made me unable to qualify for A* Talent Search, which was my sole goal for SSEF since a person must win an award in SSEF before being eligible for A* Talent Search.

  Also, judging from the results from the final judging round on the Science Centre Website, it suggested a great error in results. Chemistry, which previously was a category that many won Gold in, had only one Gold Awardee:

This is in great contrast from previous years, which had a majority of Chemistry entries out of all of the Gold Recipients, like in 2016 or 2015:

Why is there such a big contrast? I have recently called up relevant authorities regarding this issue and they basically told me that these results were based on the judges' comments and scores. But they do not equate to having such a big difference between 2016 results and 2017 results! I understand the huge competition in SSEF, but the big difference would not have happened in such a short period of time. For example, there were plenty of Chemistry project that was interesting and explained extremely well by the students, just as well or even better than those that were awarded Gold in other categories. Two examples that I could immediately think of was one on the usage of composite gels and one that uses fish gelatin to replace pork gelatin. Both are extremely significant and explained well with clear posters but yet both had failed to earn any awards. This just shows how confusing this year's results were for just the Chemistry category. The results are suggesting that this year's Chemistry students were worse off as compared to other categories, which is definitely not the case.

What's more, all of the Gold Recipients were all from the better JCs in Singapore. None were from the other JCs. In the past few years, there were still some from TJC, AJC, CJC, etc., but for this year, there was none. This may actually give people a perception of a fixed competition, though I am sure that the authorities would never allow this to happen.

I would strongly suggest the relevant authorities review this year's results and revert back to all participants of the large differences in this year's results because there is definitely an error in the results.