I did one of the verbatim express HITs this evening and it seems that auto-approvals (at least for grade 8) doesn't apply to them. Must have their own auto-approve list. What's your experience doing them? Mine was weird. The customer wanted the interviewer's speaker label and text in all caps, and the respondent in all lower case. I can't imagine why. Edit: The verbatim came through on auto, just slower than the others. Intredasting.
I did one recently that had that style requirement; I can't remember if it was verbatim. I definitely did one verbatim, but that was enough. Too much like hard work! After doing so much transcribing for CW, it's amazing how much stuff your brain discards unconsciously, and you're fighting that impulse with verbatim. When I reviewed my transcript I was a bit shocked at how much "fluff" (in quotes because of course they want it this time) I'd discarded. I'd consider going back if the pay was higher, and for verbatim I think it should be. It basically becomes difficult audio in my view, but the rate only seems to be equivalent to express. Transcribing isn't my main job though, so I just wait for expedited jobs.
My log says it didn't take me any longer to do, but I only did one. Not many people seem to want it so I might go back for more whenever the premiums kick in. I felt like you do though. It felt like more work to catch every little utterance than to clean up the transcript when that's what you're used to doing. I like that CW is getting into that more. More work means you can be more picky.
It does seem to be very popular though. If you filter by "verbatim" on the workshop you get 55 out of ~300 jobs, and that's now, when CW isn't yet tagging every verbatim job in the title. It doesn't seem to hurting the influx of expedited jobs though, so I'm happy.
I hope they tag everything that way (like Verbatim) before they shut down the old turkers.castingwords.com HIT list. That's all I use because it looks like this for me thanks to a script, and I find that far more useful than the Workshop or mTurk itself.
Yes, I hope they don't shut down the HIT list. The fact it's now workers.castingwords.com gives me hope though. Hah, my script isn't as advanced as yours, but every 10 seconds it checks for the types of jobs I want and highlights them when they appear, collapsing everything else. Edit: Before I qualified for expediteds my script resorted the jobs into pay/minute order at grade 9. Just mentioning that as I noticed you added the available pay at grade 8 ;-)
Yours sounds more advanced. Mine basically takes the data and makes a new page that to me makes better sense. Feel free to take it apart and use whatever you want, if you want anything from it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57854294/CastingWords.user.js Stuck on auto-approval 8s. Getting paid right away is nice, but I doubt that even a fifth of my work is 8 anymore.
Well what do you know. I woke up to a PPT increase today, 94 to 95. I guess 95 is the magic number because it gave me the "expert transcriber" badge in the WorkShop and now all my auto-approved HITs are grade 9. Perfect timing too, with Xmas coming up.