Design, Publish, and Manage HITs

How do I create a HIT?

The help center contains helpful guides, videos, webinars, case studies and other tools to help you get started and manage your HITs. The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Requester website is ideal for business professionals who want access to the MTurk Worker community. The Requester UI Guide will explain how to design, publish, and manage your HITs on the Requester website.

What happens when I reject work?

When you reject an assignment, the Worker who performed the assignment does not get paid, and you are not charged the standard Amazon Mechanical Turk fee for the HIT. The rejection affects your Requester statistics and the statistics of the Worker who submitted the results.

How do I get accurate results from Workers?

Consult the Best Practices Guide in the Resource Center. Our Best Practices Guide helps you plan, design, and test your Amazon Mechanical Turk HITs.

How long does Amazon Mechanical Turk keep my HITs?

Amazon will delete HITs, HIT Types, and Qualifications if they are not used for 120 days. If you require access to HIT data for longer than 120 days, we recommend you download the HIT results and store them locally.

Are there restrictions or prohibited uses of Amazon Mechanical Turk?

You may not use Amazon Mechanical Turk for illegal or objectionable activities. Please refer to the policy page for examples. For example, Requesters are not allowed to collect personally identifiable information from Workers.

How do I prevent Workers who have worked on my HIT (e.g. Surveys) once from taking part in subsequent HITs?

This can be achieved by using qualifications. Requesters can create a Qualification Type or use an existing Qualification Type to assign it to the Workers who have completed the HIT (e.g. survey) once. When creating the next HIT, Requesters can specify that only Workers who have not been granted the Qualification Type can work on the HIT. This can be done through the UI and the API.

How do I use Premium Qualifications?

Requesters can specify criteria at the time of creating the project. The available attributes can be specified in the “Worker Requirements” section of the Requester Website. To suggest a new Premium Qualification for consideration, or to share feedback about this feature, please complete this two question survey.

Can I use the Premium Qualifications for any kind of Task?

Yes, using the Create Project feature on the Requester Website, Requester customers can use Premium Qualifications for any kind of Task that has 10 or more Assignments, including Survey Tasks. The Sentiment and Categorization Project types do not support Qualifications, nor does the Create HITs individually feature.

What is the cost of using Premium Qualifications?

The use of each of the Premium Qualifications incurs an additional fee per approved assignment based on the specific Premium Qualification chosen. For more detail, see our Pricing page.

How do I retry publishing a Batch with a failed payment?

You can retry publishing by following these three steps:

1. If your batch had an input data file, download the input data file on the failed Batch Details page. You will need this file for Step 3.
2. Go to: Create->New Batch with an Existing Project , and click Publish Batch on the same Project you previously used.
3. If your batch had an input data file, upload the input file from Step 1.
4. Go through the remaining steps of publishing a batch.

If you continue to experience issues, please review your recent purchases on the My Account page.

What is the maximum number of HITs in a batch?

The maximum number of HITs in a batch is 250,000 (or 5,000 in our Sandbox environment).

In order to publish more than the maximum number of HITs at a time, you may break your input file into multiple smaller files containing less than or equal to the maximum number of HITs. If your use case requires you to publish more than the maximum number of HITs in a single batch, please contact our Business Solutions team.

Can I create and manage HITs programmatically?

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) provides Requester facing APIs as well as developer tool kits (SDKs). To get started, visit our developer Getting Started Guide.

Why do I need to have an AWS account to use MTurk APIs?

In order to call the MTurk APIs, Requesters must have registered for AWS accounts and retrieved their IAM credentials. This is because MTurk uses the AWS account to identify and allow access for developers using the MTurk APIs. We’re not using AWS to track MTurk API usage thus MTurk will not appear in AWS bills for Requesters.