Requesters arbitrarily rejecting HITs

[greg]

I'm a fairly new user to MTurk and new to this forum, so please forgive me if I am posting in the wrong place. I reviewed the rules and my question does not seem inappropriate for this forum.

I have been seeing rejections in my dashboard that I cannot figure out and the Requester provides no feedback. I'm super careful about my HITs to make sure they are accurate, but periodically they are rejected anyway. I send messages to the Requesters to get feedback but I never hear back.

It's disappointing because I know I do the work accurately, even at the expense of being slower and making less money. It feels like theft of my time, and I'm disappointed because it is damage to my reputation.. I know of a few HITs that in hindsight I may have done wrong, but I've done about 1,000 HITs so far and my rejection rate has been about 1.5%. My rejections all come from the same 3 Requesterst. I have sent Amazon feedback but of course I got no response from them either. I am no longer working on HITs from those Requesters.

Has anyone experienced problems with bad Requesters like this? Is there maybe a list of bad Requesters that I can review so I can avoid bad ones that will arbitrarily damage my reputation?

 

[jan]

I'm a fairly new user to MTurk and new to this forum, so please forgive me if I am posting in the wrong place. I reviewed the rules and my question does not seem inappropriate for this forum.

I have been seeing rejections in my dashboard that I cannot figure out and the Requester provides no feedback. I'm super careful about my HITs to make sure they are accurate, but periodically they are rejected anyway. I send messages to the Requesters to get feedback but I never hear back.

It's disappointing because I know I do the work accurately, even at the expense of being slower and making less money. It feels like theft of my time, and I'm disappointed because it is damage to my reputation.. I know of a few HITs that in hindsight I may have done wrong, but I've done about 1,000 HITs so far and my rejection rate has been about 1.5%. My rejections all come from the same 3 Requesterst. I have sent Amazon feedback but of course I got no response from them either. I am no longer working on HITs from those Requesters.

Has anyone experienced problems with bad Requesters like this? Is there maybe a list of bad Requesters that I can review so I can avoid bad ones that will arbitrarily damage my reputation?

Amazon will never get involved, so - I wouldn't bother emailing them. If the requesters email you back, then you can make a case for approval. If it's an academic requester, they not only can change their mind (based on what you say), but they have probably gotten approval from an IRB that you can appeal to.

If it's a batch HIT - the best advice is to email them and then move on. Don't work for them ever again. The general advice for the 'wild west' of mturk is to read TO before you do a HIT and never do so many HITS for one requester so that, if they mass reject, you will go below an approval rate of 98% (well, 99% is better).

Be careful out there! we (as a board) can help. But you never want to dig yourself into a hole. There have been mass rejections (a requester decides that they don't approve some of your HITS.....so they go all in and reject ALL of them). It's not often,, but it has happened.

Feel free to join us on the main thread (and welcome!)

 

[greg]

Thanks for the response. I guess I will need to be more careful about the HITs I work on. Sadly, the only way to know is to do the work and see what happens. I'll be keeping a list of bad Requesters and not working on their HITs. For now, I have to dig myself out of the hole as you say and get my approval rate back to 99%.

 

[tira]

@greg

Hope you get your approval rate back to 99% soon...
I'm also quite new with now nearly 2'000 HITs and I think it's quite difficult to choose and track the requesters. It's very annoying that there are so many surveys without code to submit and I'm getting angry, that some requesters think, they can send me a bonus of 0.05 without revoking the rejection, because they wrongly rejected my HIT at first.
As an European Turker it's anyway not easy to find good paid HITs and I often feel like on a slavery market, because I spend my time and work force for an underpayed HIT, get a rejection, have to write kind and politely and then get no feedback. This should not be the way to treat other people.

 

[greg]

@greg

Hope you get your approval rate back to 99% soon...
I'm also quite new with now nearly 2'000 HITs and I think it's quite difficult to choose and track the requesters. It's very annoying that there are so many surveys without code to submit and I'm getting angry, that some requesters think, they can send me a bonus of 0.05 without revoking the rejection, because they wrongly rejected my HIT at first.
As an European Turker it's anyway not easy to find good payed HITs and I often feel like on a slavery market, because I spend my time and work force for an underpayed HIT, get a rejection, have to write kind and politely and then get no feedback. This should not be the way to treat other people.

I have also found many HITs with no code, more so in the last few days. Or HITs that are just poorly made, broken and are non-functional. This morning I had two HITs that could never be completed in the time allotted. The HIT expired while I was diligently working on the survey. So frustrating!

 

[tira]

I have also found many HITs with no code, more so in the last few days. Or HITs that are just poorly made, broken and are non-functional. This morning I had two HITs that could never be completed in the time allotted. The HIT expired while I was diligently working on the survey. So frustrating!

Yes - and the unfairness, that requesters can construct surveys with countless errors, no end code, broken links and then reject the HITs is making me very angry. Sometimes I think I'm part of a big human experiment about online mistreating of people :grimacing:

 

[jan]

@greg

Hope you get your approval rate back to 99% soon...
I'm also quite new with now nearly 2'000 HITs and I think it's quite difficult to choose and track the requesters. It's very annoying that there are so many surveys without code to submit and I'm getting angry, that some requesters think, they can send me a bonus of 0.05 without revoking the rejection, because they wrongly rejected my HIT at first.
As an European Turker it's anyway not easy to find good payed HITs and I often feel like on a slavery market, because I spend my time and work force for an underpayed HIT, get a rejection, have to write kind and politely and then get no feedback. This should not be the way to treat other people.

have you sent them a link on how to reverse the rejection (sometimes they just don't know how to do it)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/RequesterUI/ReversingRejectedAssignment.html

 

[tira]

have you sent them a link on how to reverse the rejection (sometimes they just don't know how to do it)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/RequesterUI/ReversingRejectedAssignment.html

The problem seems to be, that some of the requesters which are posting broken HITs, have technical problems with revoking a decision and I sometimes think, they are ashamed to "confess" their problems and mistakes.

 

[TSolo315]

In my experience, requesters rejecting arbitrarily is actually pretty rare. After you spend a decent amount of time on mturk, you start to get a feel for how to pick out who the less professional requesters are and can avoid working for them, which allows you to avoid most rejections like this. Every once in a while you will still get a "survey was broken so I rejected, please retake" at which point you can

 

[tira]

As I wrote before... as an European worker, you can't be too picky, 'cause there are not enough good paid HITs and so you've got to risk the rejections.

 

[A6_Foul_Out]

'cause there are not enough good paid HITs and so you've got to risk the rejections.

no, you don't.

 

[SandraL]

How does anyone get to a 99% approval rate? I seem to be stuck at 92% and change.

 

[TSolo315]

How does anyone get to a 99% approval rate? I seem to be stuck at 92% and change.

Working on a lot of batches and having hundreds of thousands of completed HITs. I have a 99.9999% approval rate.