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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T06:58:09+00:00

Does anyone have a good method for approving people who took part in a

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Does anyone have a good method for approving people who took part in a survey on survey monkey, and who were recruited through mechanical turk?
I filter out people who did not pay attention during the survey by asking questions with obvious answers – if people get ‘n’ number of them wrong, I exclude them from payment.

After I downloaded .csv from mechanical turk, I paste two columns at the end of the .csv the MTurk Id and a 1 or 0 next to the name, indicating whether they will be paid or not.
How can I write a function that will search through the two columns containing MTurk ID’s (the one that came in the .csv and the one that I pasted in) and then return whether the MTurk ID has a 1 or 0 next to it? his would make dis/approving so much easier.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I assume you are using a spreadsheet program since you mention “Adding two columns”? Why don’t you just sort by the column with the one or zero in it to group the approved turk IDs together?

    Here is how to accomplish this with a vlookup:

    Assume you have your list of Turk IDs and the 1/0 approval code in columns A and B (A contains the Turk IDs and B contains a 1 or 0). Also assume you have the ID to test in column C and you are going to put the result of the vlookup test in column D:

      A - Turk ID     B - Approval     C - ID to test     D - Result
  -----------     ------------     --------------     ----------
1 ABC12345        0                DEF46253
2 ERF78878        1                HFH36251
3 HFH36251        1                ERF78878
4 DEF46253        0                ABC12345

    Set the formula of cell D1 to =VLOOKUP(C1,$A$1:$B$4,2,FALSE)

    Paste that into D2..D4 (obviously your list will be larger)

    It will find the Turk ID in Col A and fill in the corresponding Approval value in Col D.

    If you want to know what the arguments to the vlookup function are – the first is the value to look for (the ID you want to check), the second is the entire range of values to check (use the $’s in front of the cell references to make them absolute, so they don’t change when you paste the formula into new cells), the third is the column of that range to pull (column 2 of the range is the approval number), the last argument is FALSE which forces an exact match of ID to ID).

    Hope that helps.

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