Tutor.com reviews

This company is a sham. In a way, the reasons for this make sense. While I'm not a historian of the company, it seems to have its current market position because it has the URL of tutor.com. Tutor.com certainly reads as a dotcom era shell of a company, with software that still runs on Internet Explorer. Additionally, the US education system is fundamentally broken and corporatized. High school and state college are mostly a rubber stamp factory, so lots of unprepared and untalented kids are forced into college programs they should not have to be in to lead a successful life. Tutor.com pretends that isn’t the case (at least in the realm of essay writing - the subject I am familiar with). Tutor.com pretends that all college students are competent and just need a little help with their thesis statement, or some other vague 'higher-order concern' that nobody but Powerpoint presentation preparers would care about. Seriously, in my time working at a university writing center, our policy was to mostly avoid the content of a student's work. We would make only minimal formal suggestions when it came to structure and content. The reason why? Content is the student's job. The student needs to be the 'higher order' thinker. That's what they are, theoretically, paying to do. Tutors can help them on a technical level communicate the thoughts that *they - the student* have, but that's it. Anything else is unrealistic. What am I supposed to do, really? Give the student new, better ideas about Kate Chopin? The platform itself is buggy, crashing pretty often, with a new version that is somehow much worse than the old one most clients still use. The old version is buggy and crashes all the time, but at least it has the functions you need. How does a piece of software get demonstrably worse when it is updated and redesigned? Tutor.com knows how. Simulating busy-ness is the name of the game when it comes to college essay tutoring with tutor.com. You aren’t really supposed to help people who have clear base level issues with syntax and grammar. Instead, you are supposed to focus on “higher order concerns.” It’s like trying to fix code developed by someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand mathematics at all but just pretending it can all be rectified by cleaning up the UI. Writing skills stack up from a base level proficiency in grammar and syntax. If you are not base level proficient, the strength of your ideas will always be muddied - no matter how much “higher order” help a tutor gives you, or tries to give you. If you try to give concrete, helpful grammatical or syntactical tips too often, you will be scolded for your efforts by the so-called 'mentors'. I'm not entirely sure why I, a person with a degree in the subject, CRLA certification, and hundreds of hours of real-world experience, need a 'mentor' instead of a normal manager, like one would have in any other job, but I suppose this doublespeak, faux-positivity buzzword culture really proliferates the entire company. As far as I can tell, the only thing a tutor.com tutor is really supposed to do is think of clever ways to tell people that their ideas aren’t very good, or to tell people that their ideas are good and ignore clear grammatical issues if the tutor has exceeded their 10% "lower order" comment limit. If you want to make a bit of extra money and be constantly hounded for trying to actually help people, maybe tutor.com will work for you.

The management is very poor. They are always in disarray, changing things that make no practical improvements. It is really seasonal work and for very low pay...about $11-$12/hr. They don't listen to their employees. If you get a bad mentor, forget working there. I had one okay mentor and one terrible mentor. The second was very demotivating, a micro-manager, and extremely long-winded. Plus, the person gave practical advice to the point of being useless in today's educational environment. But my second mentor was towing the company line, and the managers expect them all to be "yes" men and women.