Thursday, May 7, 2015

If you needed more proof that Amazon Master Quaification is useless and arbitrary....

Taken from Reddit so validity is questionable, but these are posts from the latest round of workers given the mysterious Amazon Master Qualification.



Workers with 1800-337 approved HITs received masters qualification according to these posts.
These are the workers that Amazon describes as elite and charge requesters a premium of 30% to utilize.


My intention is not to bash these workers nor imply they are doing poor quality work, but they are inexperienced and once again this shows that there needs to be some transparency behind this qualification if Amazon feels they can justify requesters paying 200% more to utilize them.

Standard Amazon fees are 10%, and honestly, I will not pay Amazon 30% to use a worker with only 1800 or 300 HITs under their belt.

We have published over 200 academic studies with 9500 unique participants over 40,000 HITs with a 99% approval rate and have never once paid the additional fee for Master workers. Infact, our total costs for publishing for academics is 28% on payment which is below Amazon's fee for Master workers.

Utilizing qualifications, proper HIT design, and testing will eliminate the need for any kind of Master worker and inflated fees for these participants. It is far better to pay the participants directly for great work than pay it in fees to Amazon.



6 comments:

  1. Not that I disagree but the 337 one ended up being outed as a hoax/troll. You would be better off including the one guy who is suspended and just got masters.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A suspended worker received masters? Brilliant.

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've been requesting Masters qualification for years from mturk -- I've done over 20,000 jobs and am at 99.%5% approvals, with several of the very few rejections being arbitrary excuses by the requester, they cancelled the job, etc. for which I had no notification. Amazon always gives me an excuse and never gives me Masters qualification. I'm a full time transcriber for authors and publications around the world, but Amazon won't give it to me for lousy $.50/minute jobs. It's ridiculous.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete