Important notice
No human-participant projects for 2026–27
This restriction applies to every category, for all students in grades 9–12.
For the 2026–27 fair we are not accepting projects involving human participants (surveys, questionnaires, testing on people, measuring people, or using personal data). This includes projects where the student is the only subject.
Why?
Under ISEF rules, any project with human participants must be reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) before the student begins research. The IRB confirms informed consent, risk minimization and privacy protection. For 2026–27 our fair does not have an IRB in place, so these projects cannot be accepted under ISEF rules — and we would rather say so up front than reject work students have already done.
What counts as a human-participant project
Per ISEF definitions, this includes:
- Surveys, questionnaires, polls or interviews
- Taste, preference, opinion or reaction tests
- Physical or physiological measurement of a person (heart rate, strength, reaction time, vision)
- Exercise, diet, sleep or behavior interventions
- Observation of people where you interact with them or record identifiable information
- Use of existing personal or identifiable data about people
- Any project where you, the student, are the only subject
What does not count
- Testing materials, devices, software or structures with no human subject
- Anonymous, fully public, aggregated data sets that contain no identifiable individuals
- Studies of plants, microorganisms, or non-human animals (subject to their own forms)
- Engineering projects evaluated against measurable performance criteria rather than people