Regulating the aqueous polymerization of acrylic acid (AA) is a major opportunity for future materials design, requiring the development of scalable, industry-oriented procedures that afford modest molar mass and dispersity control without long reaction times and environmentally demanding conditions. To address these challenges, this report presents the rapid copolymerization of aqueous mixtures of AA and sodium acrylate using an inexpensive and scalable protocol based on alkyl iodides/sodium iodide as mediators in water. (c) 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2019, 57, 1414-1419