Special Admission to the
California State Science Fair

The answer to both of these questions is the same: the California State Science Fair will consider appeals for special admission owing to exceptional circumstances. The number of granted appeals is always small. In many years there are none; the number has never exceeded 0.5% of all participants in any year.

“Exceptional circumstances” means that you were blocked from the normal and expected route to the Fair. Reasons for this can include:

• You attend school in a region without an affiliated county or regional science fair.
• You do have a cognizant affiliate, but after being accepted for participation, the affiliate rejected your project, preventing it from being judged on scientific merit.
• Your school has never participated in your CSSF affiliate before and no opportunity to participate in it was ever offered. In this case a good faith effort to discover your CSSF affiliate must be shown in order to be considered for an appeal.

The California State Science Fair will not consider an appeal if:

• Your project was judged on its scientific merit at the cognizant affiliate and was not selected as a qualified or alternate project to CSSF. The affiliate is authorized to correct its mistakes after its fair is over, but CSSF will not reconsider any judging decision by its affiliates.
• Your project was not entered into the cognizant CSSF affiliate but your school has participated in that affiliate in the recent past. Similarly, if any student from your school has participated in CSSF in the recent past, an appeal will not be considered.
• You simply missed your fair's application deadline.

Procedure

If you believe that you have a project worthy of participation in the California State Science Fair and qualifies for consideration under the criteria listed above, then a letter of appeal should be submitted to the Fair via email at CalifSF@usc.edu as soon as possible, and in all cases must be submitted before the final Application Deadline. This letter should include:

1. An explanation of the reason that the project was not qualified through the normal process. If there is no affiliate covering your geographical location, that explanation is sufficient. If there is a cognizant affiliate, an explanation is required of the reason you did not participate in that fair.
2. A brief summary of the project. This is best presented in the same format as the Project Summary page of an application. If yours is a team project, make sure to include the names and grades of all team members.
3. Name and contact information for 2-3 people who can evaluate the scientific quality of the project. Ideally this will include at least one person who has judged at either the California State Science Fair or at one of its affiliates in order to establish a basis upon which a comparison may be made to other CSSF participants. If the project was done in conjunction with a professional laboratory (academic or industrial) the research director most closely connected with their work should be included. If only a teacher in your school is available, the work should be explicitly compared with work done by individual students in that school, and a statement as to whether or not the teacher is familiar with other local projects which have previously qualified to CSSF.
4. If you attend school in an area covered by an affiliated fair, you should ask them to report to us on your case. Absent comment from the cognizant affiliate, CSSF will contact them directly. Evaluations of scientific quality from the affected affiliate are particularly valuable.

Following receipt of a complete appeal, the Appeals Committee will review and convey a decision within seven days. If the appeal is approved, an application must be completed within three days or before the Final Application Deadline, whichever is earlier.