Qualification

Screen participants by including a control task in your experiment. You complete the task yourself first to define the expected responses, then Meadows compares each participant's answers against yours. Participants whose responses fall outside the configured tolerance are given a chance to retry or are disqualified.

Every task in your experiment has a Qualification tab. If the task type supports qualification, you'll see the option to set a target from a participant's results page. Task types that don't support qualification show an explanatory message on the tab.

Quick Start

1. Complete the task yourself as a participant
2. On the results page for that participation, click "Use as qualification target"
3. Configure tolerance, attempts, and messages on the task's Qualification tab

How it works

1. Create a target

Participate in the task yourself. When you view the results for that participation, you'll see a button labelled "Use as qualification target". This button only appears for task types that support qualification. Clicking it saves your responses as the expected answers that future participants will be compared against.

2. Configure settings

Open the task's Qualification tab to adjust how strictly participants are screened. You can change the tolerance, number of allowed attempts, and the messages participants see when they fail. See Settings below for details.

3. Participants are screened

When a participant completes the qualifying task, their responses are compared to your target. If the difference exceeds the tolerance, the outcome depends on how many attempts remain.

Settings

Configure these on the Qualification tab of the task.

Tolerance (%)

How much the participant's response may diverge from the target data (0–100%). For example: if the target rating is 50 and tolerance is 10%, a rating of 46 would be accepted. Default: 10%.

Allowed attempts

Maximum number of attempts before the participant is disqualified. Default: 1 (no retries — a single failure disqualifies).

Failed attempt message

Shown after a failed attempt when the participant still has retries remaining. Use {attempt} to insert the current attempt number. Default: "You did not pass attempt {attempt}. Please try again."

Disqualification message

Shown when the participant has exhausted all their attempts. Default: "You have not passed the qualification for this study."

Participant experience

What happens during qualification

Pass — The participant's responses are within tolerance. They continue to the next task in the experiment normally.

Fail with retries remaining — The participant sees the failed attempt message and the task resets so they can try again. The attempt counter increments each time.

Disqualified — The participant has used all allowed attempts. They see the disqualification message and their session ends. Their data is marked as disqualified.

Supported tasks

All tasks have a Qualification tab in their settings. If the task type supports qualification, you'll see the "Use as qualification target" button on a participation's results page. For unsupported task types, the Qualification tab displays a message explaining that the feature isn't available for that type.

To remove an existing qualification target, click "Remove qualification" on the Qualification tab.