Hi,
I’m new to prolific and I’m wondering how much participants get paid when I approve a submission. Is it only based on the time the spent or also on the completion code they provided? Thanks!
Dear Aditi
Welcome to the forum 
When you approve a submission participants will get paid the amount you set at the for your study which must be at least the minimum wage per hour that Prolific stipulates. The only exception to this rule is if the median time to complete the survey is longer than you predicted, and this means that the participants would be getting less than the minimum wage then participants will automatically be given more money (as a bonus I think) from your funds.
I usually do a test run with 10 participants to see how long the study takes.
The completion code does not affect payment but you can if you want set up completion codes that automatically approves (as opposed to requiring your manual approval) if you wish.
You can also pay bonuses manually to those that for instance give suggestions for study improvement.
Tim
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Another quick question, if the median time spent is less that what I had estimated, do participants who finished the entire study still get paid the full amount?
Yes, the participants will be paid the full amount you estimated, and it can’t be reduced even if the median time is much shorter than you anticipated, which happens a lot since participants trend to be fast. That is why I do a test with ten places, then copy the study and change the time to the actual average of those first ten. Copied studies have the same completion code (last time I checked) so you won’t need to change anything but the time and the number of places to total-10 ( unless you want to test agsin).
If you anticipated correctly you don’t need to copy the study because you can just “increase places” from the menu top right.
Good luck,
Tim
Timothy Takemoto
Yamaguchi University