Reversing a Rejected Assignment

Sometimes a requester needs to reverse a prior "reject" decision on an assignment. Perhaps there was an error in the HIT that caused the worker to be unable to correctly complete the task, a misunderstanding about the HIT, or simply an error on the part of worker or requester. Approving a rejected HIT is easy, provided that it is within 30 days of the rejection. Thereafter it is not possible to reverse a reject decision.

To reverse the rejection, you only need to have the AssignmentId for the worker's completed, rejected assignment. You could retrieve this using GetAssignments or perhaps you just have it on hand somewhere. The MTurk API actually provides ApproveRejectedAssignment as a separate API endpoint from the ApproveAssignment operation, but MTurkR wraps these two features together into ApproveAssignment. The only difference between approving an assignment and approving a rejected assignment is specifying the rejected=TRUE argument, which MTurkR uses to point your request to the appropriate API endpoint.

Thus approving a rejected assignment (something not possible in the Requester User Interface) is simple in MTurkR:

ApproveAssignment("26XXH0JPPSI23H54YVG7BKLEXAMPLE", rejected=TRUE)

And, of course, you specify more than one AssignmentId as a character vector and, optionally, include feedback to the worker:

ApproveAssignment(
    c("26XXH0JPPSI23H54YVG7BKLEXAMPLE1","26XXH0JPPSI23H54YVG7BKLEXAMPLE2"),
    feedback="Sorry for the error. Great work!",
    rejected=TRUE)