At the completion of a session, you should promptly mark the attendance status of participants in the system to ensure proper credit grants. The reason for the prompt handling of this situation is in the event your study is a pre-requisite for another study, as well as for good record-keeping. You do not want to hold up other studies that are waiting on your response to the study you just ran.

To grant or revoke credit for a timeslot, you must first find the desired study and timeslot. To view your studies, choose the My Studies option from the top toolbar. Click on the Timeslots link in the View column for the desired study. Then, select the timeslot you would like to see, and click the Modify button.

You will see a list of participants, identified either by name or ID code. If the participant properly participated in the study, click the radio button next to their name in the Participated column.

If the participant did not appear for the timeslot, you may choose to mark their no-show as excused or unexcused. Depending on how your system is configured, an unexcused no-show may result in a penalty being assessed for the participant (the system will compute this automatically), or their privileges to use the system may be restricted. You should ask your administrator for guidelines about when to grant an excused no-show or an unexcused no-show. Generally, excused no-shows are granted for extenuating circumstances, like if the participant was involved in a car accident on their way to the appointment. An unexcused no-show is generally used when the participant did not show up and had no reasonable excuse. For most schools, many of the no-shows are unexcused and are due to carelessness on the part of participants. A no-show generally does not prevent the participant from signing up for the same study again, unless they a general account limitation occurred as part of earning the no-show.

Depending on how your system is configured, you may see an option to grant a credit value that is different from the standard credit grant. This is useful when you want to grant a participant a lower credit value because they left the study early, or a higher credit value if the study ran longer than expected. The default value that is selected is the study’s standard credit value. If this is enabled, then you may also grant 0 credits. This is useful if you do not want to grant credits to the participant, but also want to prevent them from participating in the study again. If a participant is granted 0 credits, and the study is set to prevent duplicate sign-ups, then the participant will not be able to sign up for that study again.

If desired, enter any comments about the session in the Comments section. Generally, this is used to indicate the reason for denying credit. Participants will see anything you enter in the Comments section for their sign-up, and these comments will be included in the email sent to participants when a credit grant/revocation occurs, if notification emails are enabled on your system.

Click on the Update Sign-Ups button at the bottom of the list of sign-ups to save your changes. Credit will be granted or a penalty assessed, as necessary. The participant(s) will be emailed about this, depending on how your system is configured.

It is not recommended to leave any sign-up for a timeslot that has occurred in the “No Action Taken” stage. This is a credit “limbo” and the system will warn you upon your next login that the timeslot has not been dealt with properly. Note that if Manual Cancellation is enabled and you would like to cancel a participant’s sign-up, the sign-up must be in No Action Taken state.

Depending on how your system is configured, the system may automatically grant credit to participants for timeslots that are more than an administrator-specified number of hours old, and where the researcher has taken no action. You can always change the automatic credit grant later if it was in error. The automatic credit grant takes place once a day, usually overnight. Your administrator can let you know if such a feature is enabled on your system.

If you need to do a simple credit grant or no-show across many timeslots, see the Uncredited Timeslots section, which offers such a feature.