Hi there, I'm new to MTurk, just started this week. I unfortunately have had a huge number of rejections from a requester but they have left no feedback. It is confusing because I took my time and followed the instructions consistently, so how can I have approximately 50% correct and 50% rejected? So my approval rate is now 57% which seems impossible to come back from. Is it worth trying to contact them or should I just suck it up and avoid their hits in the future?
First and foremost, I'm so sorry for your rejections. This is not how your first week at Amazon Turk should have gone. It can be a wonderful experience. Take a deep breath. Definitely reach out to the Requester and ask for specifics. Tell them that you did all of the hits carefully and you would appreciate them reviewing the hits. You see that many were approved and "several" were rejected. Perhaps there was a computer error "?". Give them the benefit of the doubt. The very very best of luck to you!
In the meantime, if you want to keep working on Mturk, you should pad your numbers. You are going to need them if this requester does not reverse the rejections, or you will need them in the future. It sucks, but doing a lot of penny HITs, even just a few dozen a day will go a long way.
That exact same thing happened to me when I first started back in January. Got 16 rejections from the same requester before I even got to 25 completed HITs. My approval rating was somewhere around 45% iirc. Since then, it's happened to me again. Out of my 47 rejections, 30 of them are from the same two people. Only 17 of them are legitimate (i.e. I missed an attention check of something). It really is frustrating that Amazon can't do anything about it. I've emailed them both times and got the same prewritten email saying that they can't resolve conflicts between worker and requester. Completely unfair that I'm now just barely hanging on to 99%, and completely unfair that they've essentially crippled you before you've even started. Do not do any batch HITs unless the requester has a 99%+ rating. Ever. The ones I did that got mass rejected had no approval rating yet, so I thought it was probably okay. As you can see, it was not okay. Don't be like me.
The people over at Turkopticon were trying to put together a petition about rejections. I don't think it will go anywhere, but you might seek them out.
Thanks for the further replies, I've since found out how to check for rejection rates and this requester has an approval rate of 69% so lesson learned. I'm finding it difficult to get a quantity of HITs to even out my approval rate of 67%, almost every HIT says no more available even though it stays in the queue, maybe because I'm in the UK and don't qualify.
When i first started out this happened to me too, i think i had 80 rejected! Just keep doing what you can to get your numbers up. Ben Peterson and Stormation hits helped me get my numbers up. Also in the UK and i think we generally have less available.
