21st August 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At the time of year when A Level and GCSE exams results are being published, it’s not just hopeful students who are eagerly awaiting the results. Every private tutor is also crossing fingers for good results, not just because the tutor cares about his or her students, and wants them to succeed in life, but also because tutors take a great deal of pride from their students’ grades and how much a student improves during a course of tuition. Many tutors advertise themselves as having achieved straight As for their students, so the question is: is a student’s grade the best way to judge the quality of the tutor?
We once had a tutor who, after meeting a student, refused to teach him. The tutor claimed that she didn’t think the student would get an A in his final exam, and didn’t want him to harm her ‘perfect’ tutoring record. This is obviously a little ridiculous; we could all claim to be brilliant tutors if we only taught students destined to get the top grade in their final exams. However, it highlights the problem when judging the quality of a tutor: final grades tell you nothing about how much the student has improved.
It seems as though all we’re left with is to look at where a student starts and where they finish, and use that grade difference as the way to assess how effective the tutor has been. In the short-term this is a plan with no drawbacks. Parents and students are certainly concerned with grades and hire a tutor with the aim of improving an existing grade. The trouble is that improving exam technique can often lead to significant grade improvement, but actually not improve a student’s understanding of the subject. Indeed, many tutors boast about their ability to quickly help a student solely through exam technique. Long-term, this approach can be detrimental, because the student might continue their education with a higher grade, but poorer understanding and be less prepared for future study.
There is no doubt that improving exam technique is a powerful weapon in a tutor’s armoury, but ideally we want tutors to be developing understanding so that the student is becoming a better student, rather than simply a student who is better at taking exams. Herein lies the problem, assessing how well a tutor has developed understanding is incredibly difficult; often it’s not even something the student can judge particularly well. It’s not always apparent from the student’s exam results, and by the time the improved understanding starts to help, the tutor’s efforts could have finished a long time ago.
In truth, to judge the quality of a tutor one really has to watch him/her teach, because every other indictor can be misleading and has so many other factors affecting it. Unfortunately it’s a long road to helping everyone to understand this, parents, students, and, most importantly, tutors.