Department of Psychology

Missed Appointments by Participants

• Researchers are required to keep track of participants who do not show up for their experiments. A penalty equal to the amount of credit awarded by your experiment will be imposed for an unexcused absence.
  
• An absence is excused if the participant canceled the experiment either by crossing out their name on the sheet or by contacting the experimenter at least one hour in advance. Thus, it is critical that participants be able to contact experimenters at any time.
  
• A form has been provided for you to keep track of penalties. Once a week while your experiment is being run, fill out this form and turn it in to the student working in the psychology resource center (AH 0302a). All penalties must be turned in no later than Thursday of each week. You may put them in the participant pool mailbox that is in AH-0118 if a resource center worker is not available.
  
• The student receiving the penalty will have the name, course instructor, date of study, and study number put in an excel spreadsheet by the RC assistants. At the end of each working week of the RC, the working RC assistant will sort the spreadsheet by course instructor, selectively print out the list of students for each instructor and place each individual list in the mailbox of the appropriate instructor.
  
• This process should insure that instructors have a cumulative list of the penalties assigned to their students, thus affording the opportunity to inform students of the penalty in a timely fashion.