I Know Three Parents Who Paid to Have Their Child's Project Built. I Said Nothing.

I knew.

That's the thing I've been sitting with since the MediSafe story broke in June. Not "I had a vague feeling" or "I suspected something might have been off." I knew. I was standing in the lobby of an enrichment centre in Kowloon Tong at a parent information night two years ago, and another mother — someone whose daughter is in the same year group as my older son — told me quite openly that she'd hired a programmer to "help" with her daughter's innovation project. The project subsequently won a regional science and technology competition.

I smiled and said something vague. I did not tell the competition organisers. I did not tell the school. I did not say, "That is cheating." I said nothing.

I've been asking myself why, ever since.

Let me tell you what the room was like

If you've never been in the circles where this happens, it might sound shocking. In the room I'm describing, it wasn't. It was just... Tuesday.

These were educated, successful parents. Lawyers, doctors, executives, people who would never dream of filing a fraudulent tax return or falsifying a report at work. They believe in honesty in their professional lives. And yet there was an almost collective understanding in that lobby that the gap between what children can genuinely do and what competition panels reward was something to be managed, not questioned.

The reasoning I heard, in various forms over those years:

"Everyone does it." (Some version of this was said at least four times that evening.)

"The competition is really a test of which family has the right resources and connections — we're just being realistic about that."

"My daughter will still need to learn how to present it and defend it. That's the real skill."

"If we don't do this, she's competing against kids whose parents did."

That last one is the one I understood most, and the one I'm most ashamed of understanding. Because it's structurally true. If the game is rigged, opting out unilaterally doesn't fix the rigging — it just means your kid loses. The rational response, individually, is to play the game. The collective result is a race to the bottom where nothing means anything anymore.

The three I knew about

Let me be more specific, because I think vagueness is part of how this culture sustains itself.

Over the past three years, within my own social and enrichment centre circles, I became aware of three student competition projects that were substantially built by adults for hire. One was a mobile application. One was a scientific research poster. One was a robotics project.

In the first case, a parent explicitly mentioned hiring a software developer through a contact. In the second, a mother let slip that a retired scientist had "co-developed" the methodology — a phrase that might be innocent but, in context, was not. The third I pieced together from the gap between what the student could explain about the project in conversation and what the project itself demonstrated.

I knew about all three. I said nothing about any of them.

What it costs the child

Here's the part the parents in that lobby were not talking about: what happens to the child who is passed off as the creator of work they didn't do.

I don't mean the reputational risk — the MediSafe outcome, the public exposure. I mean what happens to the child internally, long before any scandal.

They know. At some level, they always know. They know the thing with their name on it is not theirs. They cannot fully own the award, the mention in the school newsletter, the pride on their parents' faces — because somewhere beneath all of it is the knowledge that it was earned on false terms.

Some children, I think, learn from this that achievement is performance, not substance. That the point is to appear capable, not to become capable. That credentials are things you acquire, not earn. These are lessons that take years to unlearn, if they're unlearned at all.

I think about my own son. He entered a competition last year with a project he genuinely built himself — a basic game with a simple physics engine, nothing remarkable, nothing that was going to win anything. He was proud of it in a way that was almost painful to watch, because I knew how it would stack up against the competition. He didn't place. He was disappointed.

But he built it. He knows every line of what it does and why. He debugged it at 11pm on a school night because he wanted to fix a collision detection problem that was bothering him. That's real. The kid who won — with a project I had very specific reasons to find suspicious — has something different. They have a trophy and a story that doesn't fully belong to them.

My complicity

I said nothing, and I need to own why.

Part of it was social. These were people I knew. Raising a concern would have been uncomfortable, socially costly, the kind of thing you don't do if you want to keep getting invited to the right birthday parties and WhatsApp groups.

Part of it was the logic I described earlier — the "everyone does it" framing that makes silence feel like pragmatism rather than cowardice.

And part of it — the part I find hardest to admit — was that I didn't want to make trouble in a system my own children still have to navigate. A parent who reports ghost-building to competition organisers becomes known in the community. That's a social and possibly a competitive cost. I had children whose opportunities I was, on some level, trying to protect.

The MediSafe case went public because the internet noticed, not because anyone in a position to know stepped forward. That's not an accident. The silence is structural. The people who know are also the people who have the most to lose from saying something.

What I think has to change

I don't think individual whistleblowing is the answer — though I'm not going to pretend any more that silence is neutral. It isn't.

What needs to change is the design of the competitions themselves, and the value the school system places on their outcomes. If awards can be won by proxy and cashed in for real educational advantages, the incentive for ghost-building will persist regardless of how many scandals surface.

Competitions that require live demonstration and defence — where judges can probe a student's actual understanding — are much harder to game. Schools that weight genuine in-class evidence of capability more heavily than external awards would change the calculus. Parents who decide not to participate in the arms race, collectively rather than individually, could shift the culture.

None of this is quick or easy. And in the meantime, parents in that lobby are doing their calculation, and it's going to come out the same way mine did for years.

I don't want to moralize at the end of this. I think the parents I know are not bad people. I think I'm not a bad person. I think we are people who made a series of small, individually defensible choices inside a system that made each small choice feel rational — until the sum of all those small choices produces something that a Form 4 student is standing in front of, trying to defend on television, and cannot.

The shame at the end belongs to the system more than to any one family.

But it belongs to me too. I knew. I said nothing.