Approving and rejecting work

Before workers can receive payment for tasks you post to Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mechanical Turk), the work must be approved. You can review a worker's submission prior to transferring funds to their account.

When you create tasks (HITs) in Mechanical Turk, one of the attributes you can set is the auto-approval delay. This specifies how long you have to review a task before it's automatically approved. As a general rule, it's best to keep this delay as short as possible so that workers don't have to wait overly long to receive payment for the work they did for you. Being prompt and fair in payment contributes to a positive relationship with the worker community.

Between the time a task is submitted and when the auto-approval delay is reached, you can use ListAssignmentsForHIT to review a worker's submission and validate that they've made a reasonable effort to complete the task successfully. If so, you can call ApproveAssignment to authorize payment to the worker. If you identify a worker that is putting in no effort at all on your task (spamming), you can use the RejectAssignment operation to invalidate their submission.

We recommend you only reject work when workers are clearly putting in no effort to submit an accurate response to your task. It's inappropriate to penalize a worker for submitting data incorrectly because you provided unclear instructions or they simply made a mistake in interpreting what you wanted them to do. Most workers zealously guard their approval rating and avoid doing work for requesters that they believe are in unfair in how they reject work.

In the event that you reject an assignment but then discover that the issue was not the worker's fault, you can call ApproveAssignment to reverse the rejection, but only for assignments submitted in the last 30 days that haven't been deleted.