Tutor.com reviews

Fast-paced environment can be very stressful. Student reviews are very important (they are a driving factor in earning promotions, and tutors can be dismissed if they are too low), and sometimes tutors must deal with disgruntled students or students who are just fooling around and have no intention of learning. These students might leave bad reviews that are undeserved. This is conducive to an environment where tutors are pressured to keep students happy at all costs. Pay is a lot less than many in-person tutoring jobs, but the time saved by not having to commute makes up for this to some extent. It can be difficult to get on the schedule at first, and to get more than the minimum number of hours (5, 6, 7, or 8 per week, depending on tutor level).

Before the beginning of last summer (summer of 2015), the company had a policy where tutors could work with students up to 29 hours a week. I would be able to float and get about 6-7 hours regularly per day. Then they stated that in order to give all tutors a chance to get some hours during the summer, they were going to institute a daily hours cap. The communication from the company made tutors believe this practice would just be applied during the summer period when demand goes down. Once the new school year began though, management decided to keep the daily hour cap. Now instead of working 29 hours a week, my weekly cap is 14 hours a week (daily 2 hour cap). Before the cap was instituted, my monthly rating level would be around 4.7-5, which would allow me to earn the monthly 12% bonus. Now, I am even lucky to break 4.5. The reason for this is because I work with less students. The student I do work with become angry that I am forced to cut my sessions with them so they leave me negative reviews. Tutor.com does not even allow me to finish working with the student. Once the time limit is reached, I am kicked off their server and thus the student thinks I just decided to quit working with them. Unfortunately, tutors are not given the opportunity to talk to each other or provide each other with contact information. As a result, it is difficult to figure out whether these daily hours caps are being placed on all tutors or just tutors from certain states (check out the subreddit for tutordotcom). In my time with the company, I have only had one positive mentor to work with who was willing to make positive suggestions instead of nitpick on worthless things. My current mentor was not even aware there was a daily hours cap in place (which leads me to believe this cap is placed on certain tutors). This mentor has suggested that in order to not receive negative ratings, that I should just decline sessions or not even tutor when I am close to my cap.