Every year we get a number of students wanting us to respond to their final year project survey or investigation. This is identified in the Forum Rules, but the causes are rather complex, and I can see a reason why students don't see that it applies to them, or are resistant to the guidelines.
Undergraduate students have to do final year projects, portfolios, long essays or somesuch demonstration of their understanding of the research process. They are usually prepared for this from second year (level 5 on some schemes).
The problem is there are thousands of them doing this every year. Usually a small minority have a clear idea what they want to do, get the right advice early, and are well underway following the correct procedures. Some institutions provide frameworks or wider projects within which one student's dissertation contributes to a longer process involving many, but the better students are selected.
What we tend to get in here are the ones who haven't planned ahead, often the ones who haven't been attending the research methods seminars. They are getting close to milestones such as having to produce a research hypothesis or a literature review for interim assessment, so they just grab what they can. Going on line and finding websites including forums like this may seem to be salvation. Such students aren't bothered about the rules and may be hoping to scrape through with a 2:2 or a third.
Also we tend to get students from unconventional courses for this kind of thing. We quite often get product design students who have opted to do a project around something useful to disabled children. It may well be that their dissertation supervisors or other tutors don't consider the impact their quests have. Even so if a tutor is setting up worshops around products for special needs, you would think the tutors would have an inkling (even if they are just glorified woodwork teachers).
Social Studies and Health Studies on the whole should properly advise students not to use disability forums or other sites with an inadequately defined population. However we do seem to get newer universities with "stack em high sell em cheap" approaches (large numbers of students and too few staff supervising), who don't seem to care where their students go for data.
We get a lot currently collecting data on children, even if it is through parents. I find it mind-boggling that their universities haven't made the issues clear to them. There are ways of researching around minors, but it includes getting screened beforehand, and strict guidelines. Yet every year there are students somewhere who get into trouble with the law found collecting data in parks, school playgrounds and in social events for under 16s. Some universities clearly don't understand the risks.
I think the Forum Rules needs a clearer set of instructions to students. These are people just trying to complete their degree, but as indicated, they aren't the high fliers who might go on to useful research. They are often the ones lucky if they scrape through, whose dissertations would be better shredded afterwards. Helping them isn't helping autism awareness.
Also it is worrying that these students are asking people on the forum to divulge personal and sensitive information for their project. Assessment of dissertations generally means the products being handed round staff for comments, left out for externals to look at and for the exam board, and left in accessible rooms until students comne in to collect them afterwards. They are not secure depositories.
