Avantages
While I was working, the work-shortage problem wasn't as bad as some other tutors report. You more or less can work any time of day, without even a need to schedule. Tutees are mostly friendly and receptive. They bring interesting topics; it's good to passively learn random stuff as part of your job.
Inconvénients
#### Administration: Tutor.com’s onboarding process is quite slow. All in all, I waited about three weeks before I was working for pay. When you are “hired” by tutor.com, you are initially considered a temporary worker pending approval at the end of a six-week “probation” period. My main contact at tutor.com was the mentor that oversaw me during this probationary period. I am a professionally trained, seasoned writing tutor. I am past the point on the learning curve where one feels they know everything. So believe me when I say: this mentor, assigned to instruct me in college essay tutoring, did not know how to tutor students in essay writting. My mentor sure thought that they did, though. They left me pages of feedback every week. I really have to commend this mentor’s commitment: they read the transcripts of most if not all of my typed tutoring sessions, and even listened to the recordings of my voice sessions. Those pages of feedback, however, were unhelpful and sometimes self-contradictory. Some of my favorite suggestions include: - *Don’t tell this nursing student that, since you aren’t a medical expert, you can’t verify the integrity of their argument.* - *Only direct students to online resources that have a .edu domain.* - *You left too much feedback on this person’s college admission essay.* This mentor did seem to have a theoretical idea of what good tutoring required, but no idea what it looked like in practice. They routinely criticized me for mistakes, like “you didn’t confirm that the student understood the concept,” that were obviously not made. Again: I won’t say that I didn’t make mistakes, in fact I learned a lot about tutoring from this job, but my mentor’s ignorance was undeniable. Their disapproval added considerably to the stress of the job. When it became clear that my mentor considered me unsatisfactory, I contacted tutor support to request a second opinion. I should mention that I mostly found the tutor support team very good. Their responses had previously been fast and helpful. In this case, however, it was six days before the ticket was updated with a note from the department manager. Four days after that, my account was suspended. I did recieve a message from that same department manager, but there was no mention of the second opinion I had requested, nor was my support ticket updated. This suspension didn’t just remove my tutoring privileges, but in fact locked me out of the entire system. So, if I had wanted to review my previous sessions and reviews to prepare for my trial, that was impossible. #### Pay: Pay starts at slightly-above-California-minimum-wage and can grow to slightly-above-D.C.-minimum-wage with promotions. Getting your pay raised above $15 an hour takes months at least. As others have pointed out, you aren’t paid when you are “floating,” meaning unscheduled and waiting for overflow tutor demand. I didn’t suffer too much from this, but even **if you spend just six minutes per hour waiting, that is effectively a 10% reduction in your hourly pay rate.** Depending on who you are and when you are working, your ability to schedule hours can be quite limited. And if you ARE scheduled, but there isn’t enough demand for there to be a tutee for you, there is a different, lower pay rate for that time. That lower rate does NOT increase with promotion. #### What it feels like to be a writing tutor for tutor.com: Stressful. The first stressor is the “tutee ready” chime which the classroom software uses to announce that you can begin a session. The longer you wait, the more unexpected it is, and this chime is LOUD. It took me a few days to stop jumping whenever it sounded. Okay, I kid. The real stress is tutoring on a timer. Of course, this isn’t unusual: most jobs run on a clock of some kind. But what makes tutor.com’s essay tutoring so stressful their asynchronous sessions, wherein you are provided a document to review and a time limit. Before the clock runs out, you are expected to give a comprehensive review of the entire piece, regardless of how long it is. That includes written feedback on five areas of essay quality, links to online resources for further help, instructions on next steps, and, most importantly, abundant comments in the document itself. Most assays come with 50 minutes to review, but some shorter ones get 35 minutes and some longer ones get 80 minutes. I understand that tutor.com needs some sort of standardization to stop employees from just juicing the company, but it is very stressful to try and stay on the curve that allows as much good feedback as possible without going over the time limit. In many cases it is impossible to give the student anything except the broadest statements about their work. Common student concerns like sentence clarity and Works Cited pages often got left by the wayside. It always felt bad to leave an apologetic message for the student saying that I hadn’t covered those things, especially knowing that when they took their writing to the next tutor for polishing, they would likely get the same result. If you are lucky enough to get a live session (I estimate about ⅓ of sessions are live), then things are more comfortable. By-and-large, students speak good english and are receptive to tutoring. There is a sixty-minute time limit for live sessions, but there is no expectation that you will get through the whole essay, and students are usually grateful for the help you are able to give within that hour. The downside to live sessions was the fact that most of them are not voice sessions. Doing writing tutoring via text-chat is agony: things that would normally be done in ten minutes sometimes take up the whole hour. #### Technical problems, oh my! I think that the tutor.com classroom might CAUSE occasional internet outages?! While I was in the classroom, and ONLY when I was in the classroom, I would get these little internet failures. It was about once every six hours on average. These weren’t just classroom disconnects: the whole computer would get disconnected briefly from the internet. Others in house didn’t get disconnected at these times. I was using a VPN, but even if that was a contributing factor, I don’t see this happening with other services that pass through the VPN. The classroom usually failed to recover from any disconnect; I always lost work. I was told that using the ‘save’ button prevented this, but I never saw it work. Oh, and don’t think that that 50-minute timer reset when work was lost! ###### Lightning round! - Many links for tutor.com related things, including past sessions, open in Internet - Explorer. I didn’t even know that IE was still installed on my computer. - Links to prior asynchronous sessions don’t work at all. - Classroom’s text editor undoes your typing if the tutee starts typing before you stop. - Employee exit survey is labeled “Exit Survey (2014).” - Classroom’s chat window either doesn’t allow URLs or opens them in the classroom’s browser and then deletes them. I can’t remember. - Remember those two pages of feedback I got every week? Well, for the first two weeks I didn’t notice them at all, because they were hidden inside a text-box on the review page that was just large enough to hold 100 characters. I’d like to share a screenshot with you, but, as I said, I’m locked out even from seeing my records! ##### Would I recommend tutor.com? If you want to work as a tutor but are having trouble getting hired because you can’t teach little kids, or you don’t want to work China hours, or you don’t have teaching certifications, tutor.com is there for you. Based on my experience, it seems that “there” is at the bottom of the barrel. If you have other prospects, pursue them before you pursue tutor.com. But if tutor.com is the best chance you’ve got for a flexible work-from-home job, then sure, why not go for it?