Entry Form
The ten application tasks — essays, activities, and the record of who the student is beyond a single project. Read for coherence, not decoration.
The United States' oldest and most selective pre-college science competition — advised from the inside of the rubric, and critiqued before submission with an evaluator calibrated on real scored data.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search is run by the Society for Science and asks something narrower than most competitions: not a polished poster, but a complete case that a young scientist has done real, independent, significant work and could keep doing it. Every submission is read as a whole — the research paper and the ten-task application together — and scored on four equally weighted criteria out of 20.
Tian2 has read the complete submissions of confirmed winners across the entire "On The Table" range and built an AI-evaluation system calibrated against the official 4-criterion rubric and 463 scored submissions. That evaluator is used to critique an application against the exact standard the Society applies — before it is ever submitted.
The ten application tasks — essays, activities, and the record of who the student is beyond a single project. Read for coherence, not decoration.
Is the research sound, rigorous, and correctly reasoned? The paper carries this criterion — method, controls, analysis, and honest limitations.
What did the student actually do? Evaluators separate genuine independent work from a name added to a lab's ongoing programme.
The forward-looking read: does the whole application suggest a person who will keep doing significant science? Voice and trajectory matter here.
Rather than guess at what evaluators want, Tian2 works backward from evidence: the full 463-row score sheet, the four official selection groups, and the complete submissions of eleven confirmed "On The Table" winners spanning rank #23 (18.6/20) down to rank #302 (16.5/20), with the 19.33/20 exemplar anchoring the ceiling. The method is the same one applied to a student's own draft.
The draft is scored against all four criteria on the /20 scale — the same lens evaluators use — to locate exactly where points are won and lost.
Each criterion gets a concrete gap list, benchmarked against the pattern of 18+ scorers versus the 16.5 admission floor.
Paper structure and the ten application tasks are revised toward clarity for a non-specialist reader and honest documentation of contribution.
A final pass for the mistakes that quietly cost points — overclaimed contribution, missing controls, and uncited scaffolding.
Built from the complete submissions of 11 confirmed "On The Table" winners (ranks #23–#302) plus the 19.33/20 calibrated exemplar, cross-referenced with the full 463-entry score sheet. It sets out the selection formula, the criteria breakdown, six repeatable differentiators that separate 18+ scorers from the 16.5 floor, the red flags that cost points, a no-lab playbook, and an interactive pre-submission scorecard.
Read the findings reportThe analysis is built from public statistics and de-identified score data; names and individual dossiers are never published. Student work is shown only as anonymized archetypes — field, method, result, and venue. See the Research section →