Welcome to Grad Student Season!
If you have noticed an increase in available HITs lately, you aren’t alone! With fall semesters in full swing across the world of academia, grad students are beginning to use Mturk for their research, and some of them for the first time.
Here are some tips on working with these new academic requesters:
- Have a look at worker reviews if there are any. This can sometimes ease that “new requester” anxiety.
- Everyone makes mistakes. If you see a glaring error in a requester’s HIT, a polite approach is appreciated. Many requesters receive little to no training on how to use Mturk.
- If you have questions on a HIT, reach out to the requester. Obtaining clarification will reduce your risk of rejection and increase the quality of the data in the study. If we want requesters to continue to provide work, we need to give good quality data.
- Sometimes a requester rejects and they either didn’t mean to do it or didn’t understand what a rejection would mean for the worker. If this is the case, asking for a reversal and providing them with a link to instructions on how to reverse it can be quite helpful. (We need to remember there are legit reasons for rejections, however.)
The reversal instructions can be found here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/RequesterUI/ReversingRejectedAssignment.html
We hope this makes navigating “grad student season” a little easier!