How long until PPT rises?

An estimate? Sure. I got to 96 in less than a month, to 99 two or three weeks after that. But that is all that can be, only an estimate, because some have probably gotten there faster or taken longer.

It's impossible to give you a definite timeframe without knowing (and no one can predict for you) how you'll keep scoring. But if you want 95+, you'll need a solid pattern of 9s after a certain point, so that would be the next thing to work on. You've got a good start...keep improving and you'll probably be pretty happy with how it turns out.

 

Good going!

Yes, you are totally right that sometimes graders make mistakes that contradict the Style Guide. However, if you check out this post on my blog (and its comments), you'll see that it's not at all true that your only two choices are auto-approval 8's or no auto approval. This can be fixed.

 

Exactly the problem that I had. I admit I didn't have a great start. Once I'd done 20 or so hits I was getting fairly consistent 8s or 9s, but with that start I was crippled with a poor average from the beginning.

I was being auto-graded at 8 for a long time, and getting 9s more than 50% of the times I was being human-graded. After a few hundred hits (seriously) my PPT finally went up by three points at once quite recently, suggesting human intervention. From that point on I was being auto-graded at 9 (exciting!), and over the next couple of weeks (~50 more hits) it ticked up those last crucial couple of points to 99.

You're not going to like this, but all in all? About 500 hits for me to get to 99. 2-3 months' work.

Amusingly I've yet to do any transcribing since then. Those expedited hits disappear fast!

 

Sigh, castingwords graders are everywhere. Some people tell you to do one thing while others tell you something else. It's very confusing for someone just starting out like me. Here is my most recent grade.

Reward: $0.13 Score: 7.00
Bonus: $0.13 Agree with graders on Transcription for TC 478986, 'Audio Transcription: Denver Boston #146310 (145% premium) (avg rwrd+bns: $0.26) [01:03 mmss]' AssignmentId: 2EXUUKQOYGNI4OIMJ170507U3ZMGY9.
Violet
Grade: 9
Comments: Good transcript.

dancoman1
Grade: 9
Comments: Excellent transcript

As you can see, I forgot one word. It was math in front of the word teacher. But the entire transcription talked about doing math problems, etc and math teacher was mentioned other places. That's it, one word, got docked 2 points. It's obviously supposed to be a 9 but I think castingwords has their grading level set on auto grade to the lowest score someone gave. At least that's how it feels for me. I've had about 10-14 transcriptions that could have easily been 8 or 9 and I got 7's on them. It's very upsetting and I've tried contacting castingwords support but they have gone rogue on me just like everyone else from mTurk I try to contact anymore.

 

What?

I've had the grade given by the system obviously disagree with that given by a human grader before, sometimes by more than one grader, as it is here.

I've been told in the past that grades issued are sometimes based on your track record rather the graders, which I'm guessing is a way of weighting your grades in favour of your track record but leaving room for it to rise (not enough room IMO, but that's another discussion). But yeah, cases like this are frustrating.

When it has happened to me in the past (and I'm only talking about the last few weeks here) I spoke to support and it usually gets increased, and the extra bonus paid.

 

Well for some reason they are very tough on me. That one obviously should have been raised but it won't be. My score also dropped from an 82 to an 81 and I've gotten like 10 8's and 9's in a row now. And when I got like 20 7's in a row, it stayed at 82. I don't get it? Is this score controlled by CastingWords rather than the overall percentage of my grades? I have one point to go and then I am out. No matter how hard I try, I seem to always get 7's. I am an average person so it kind of makes sense. But when I spend a half hour on each of my minute scripts, it seems I get worse grades then when I rush on them...go figure.

 

My PPT hasn't been updated since July 20, 2012. It seems like the number is generated on demand by CW and then set with mTurk. It's not calculated after every HIT, or every month, or as far as I can tell after any regular interval or action.

Guess I should be happy to be stuck at 94. Could be worse.

 

pwt, CW may consider you maxed out or assume you're fine with where you are. It's up to you to prove them wrong with your record from here.

And sought, 20 grades of 7 in a row is definitely reason for your CW PPT to stay steady. Actually, it's a little surprising they didn't drop it further for so many 7s. As I've mentioned in this blog post, 7 is not a rating that says you're doing well. Also...missing one significant word, no matter how obvious from context, in a relatively short transcription would always warrant a 7, especially if even a single tiny something-else was wrong with it. CW's own grading guidelines indicate that missing words are considered major issues in a transcript. So your logic that your score on that transcript should have been raised isn't sound.

But...if you do better when you go faster, then go faster! Do what you need to do to get your scores up, but since it sounds like your grades really aren't unfair, your time is probably best spent figuring out how to improve, rather than finding reasons to insist that you're being treated badly.

 

Of my last eight manual grades, I've gotten a G9 on all of them. The intervening 43 were autos. So I think I'm heading in the right direction, but I'm definitely going to wait longer before asking for a review. Better HIT selection and more personal effort have been making a difference for me this month. $66 in nine days may not be hitting it out of the park, but it's getting done what I need done.

What I'm starting to miss with these auto-approvals is the lack of feedback when I ask for it as a comment to the HIT. Since I haven't heard anything from CW or any graders/editors, how would you handle "650K" in the context of US financial dealings? I ended up writing "$650,000" even though the speaker didn't say dollars, but the sentence that proceeded it did specify the US trading market.

 

For what it's worth, I've noticed recently that the last audio chunk in a series is always human-graded. If it isn't obvious from the content, the filename has "EOF" (end of file) at the end, so it's worth commenting on those if you want any specific feedback from the grader.

Otherwise, I just yell support if I want feedback on something not in the style guide. I personally would probably do the same as you in that situation you mentioned.

Only other thing to say is keep slogging away. It took me a long time but I got there, and it's worth it.

 

Good work there!

Right, on auto-approves, they're not necessarily paying close attention to your comments unless they see something in the transcript that they wonder about, and the likelihood of that is reduced once they put you on auto-approves, too. Electricaltill is right that you'll need to contact support directly to get your feedback in those cases; the graders and editors may never see your feedback request otherwise. I also hear you, though, that you're staying under their radar until you're ready to ask for your manual review, so...kind of a double-edged sword there.

One thing I will say is that if you want feedback to learn from, just ask support for that, and dispute nothing they say, if you want to stay under the radar for now. Just take it and absorb it and don't make it a discussion. Then they probably won't really register that you said anything...but you'll have your feedback.

Did they say "650K," as in the actual letter "K"? If yes, I would type it just like that: 650K.

Just as you don't want to leave out important words, you also shouldn't put any in that are not said, and putting in the dollar symbol is just like typing in "dollars." So even if it's clear by context that they meant dollars, dollars should not be indicated by you unless the actual word "dollars" was spoken as part of that specific sentence.

Transcribing is very concrete that way.

 

I have only done one for CW. I got a 90 but I have never done any others. The pay is so crappy I find it annoying.

 

He said the letter K. So I did it wrong. Crap.

It's up and down, and despite my own complaints I find the pay better than just about anything else on mTurk. I had one HIT on the 19th that was 98 seconds long, paid $0.56 which I got a G9 on so it paid $1.68, and it only took nine minutes to do that one. The 19th ended up being $14.10 for 11 HITs. The 20th was $11.70 for 12 HITs.

Some days are better than others. I had to do 19 HITs on the 16th to get $13.87. Going after some of the difficult audio work has been worth it these past few days.

But yeah, it's not for everybody. I'd rather do surveys all day if there were enough of them. The only pain about those is many of them say to only take it once, so you have to keep track of ones you've already done. I made a spreadsheet for it which helps. But talk about zero effort/no work for money...surveys rule.

 

Bobbie01...if you did one and got a 90, that sounds like you did work for SpeechInk, not CW. CW's HIT-grading scale doesn't include 90. You can get to a qual of 90 with them, but it would not ever happen in one HIT.

Sorry to hear that, about your style choice! But...now you know.

Totally agree with you on surveys. Come to think of it, I might have gotten interested in transcription partly because the surveys made me nuts, when I was a baby Turker!

 

I figured you did or had done transcribing outside of MTurk too. At the very least it surprises me that you didn't do it right away.

 

BTW...people who are saying that they're getting nothing from CW support -- how are you contacting them? There's three ways of contacting them, but only one that allows you to see the response.

1: You can email support@castingwords.com. They respond, but only on their dedicated support site, which is not listed anywhere that's easy to find. I can't even remember how I found it now.

2: Use "contact the requester of this HIT" on a particular mturk HIT. Again, CW respond to you on their dedicated support site. If you don't have an account there, you won't see any response.

3: Create an account on support.castingwords.com and submit your questions/problems there. This has always, always, ALWAYS worked for me since I registered there. It seems that when you first create the account it populates it with any questions that you had previously submitted by email or from mturk, because when I logged in for the first time, my questions from mturk (which by then I'd forgotten about) were there, with their answers.

In summary: sign up on support.castingwords.com, and enjoy getting responses to everything.