Do password meters create stronger passwords? ECE's LERSSE members, in collaboration with Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley wrote Does My Password Go up to Eleven? The Impact of Password Meters on Password Selection. Password meters tell users whether their passwords are "weak" or "strong". In a laboratory experiment, by forcing users to change their current passwords, they found that having the meters did have users selecting stronger passwords. In a follow-up field experiment for unimportant accounts, the authors found that the meters did not change the outcome of the users’ passwords.
Please see the following press coverage of the paper and the paper below: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/its-official-password-strength-m...
http://lersse-dl.ece.ubc.ca/record/282