Disseration Survey Scam?

[zulufox]

I frequent 3 forums. WebmasterWorld, a travel forum, and a company's forum.

In the past 3 weeks EVERY forum has had a post about a online questionaire for a dissertation.

Is this some sort of shady business? My scam senses begin to tingle when I see that 100% of the forums I visit have a recent disseration questionaire request (meaning there are a lot more out there) and these dissertations provide info and possible content for someone without them doing any work.

Are we being exploited or am I just paranoid?

[Lord Majestic]

Why would asking to fill in a survey for a disseration trigger your scam filter? Would it be okay if they offered you money or some other reward?

dissertations provide info and possible content for someone without them doing any work.

Surveys merely provide numbers that need to be analysed to see if they support or not main theory used in dissertation. There is hell a lot more work in disseration to do beyond even analysis of survey. Survey is a desireable but not main component of dissertations.

I used online survey (on my site rather than posting it in forums tho) in my disseration in 1997 and nobody back then even thought of suggesting that they are doing work for me or that its a scam of some kind :(

[zulufox]

Let me clarify, if these really are for disserations then I have no problem. I love the academic world.

I was getting suspicious seeing so many requests that I was beginning to think they were non-students trying to get some content or info.

[Lord Majestic]

I think its more likely that more students picked up on the idea, and its getting close to dissertation submission time :)

[Essex_boy]

Ive satrted getting these in my email inbox.

I too suspect something fishy

[zulufox]

I've found that when something starts popping up all over the place, it can generally be traced to something fishy.

I was thinking maybe a phisher or webmaster circle had figured out that disserations were a great way to X and started spamming questionaires. (I have no idea what X is).

[superbird]

People are freaking out about their dissertations right now, last year I nearly threw my boyfriend out over his! It will die down in a few weeks.

[RailMan]

dissertation questionairres are a great way of finding out sensitive company info about your competitors .......... it's amazing just how stupid some of your competitors are .......... they'll tell you anything if they think they're helping a poor student .........