21st January 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Some people consider private tuition to be unfair, thinking that it creates inequality in what should be an equal system. This is a debate that is unlikely to be resolved in the near future; one could also claim that it’s unfair for a child to be helped with education by their parents, if the parents have an academic background. Most arguments about morality in tutoring tend to be shades of grey.
However, there is one area associated with private tuition on which the vast majority of people agree, whether involved or not involved in the industry. This area is coursework, and more specifically, to what extent should a tutor be allowed to help a student with their coursework? Should a tutor have any involvement in a student’s coursework at all?
The most obvious answer to this question is a resounding ‘no!’, but looking more deeply into the problem, there do appear to be grey areas here as well. For example, it would seem unreasonable for a tutor to not teach a student about say, Macbeth, but would that mean that the tutor has helped with a piece of coursework on Macbeth? To take the idea to it’s ludicrous extreme, is teaching a young child to write considered unfair because that child will eventually grow up to ‘write’ some coursework?
Helping with coursework has to come down to specifics. If a tutor suspects that anything a student asks for will go ‘word-for-word’ into a piece of coursework then they can’t submit to the student’s request. The main guideline has to be to help as much as possible with the understanding of ideas involved in a piece of coursework, but only deal with general cases, and not a specific case associated with a piece of coursework.
As a tuition agency, Blue Tutors identify when they suspect a student may be seeking an unfair advantage with coursework, and ask all tutors to be vigilant against the possibly of offering, unarguably, an unfair advantage.