1st July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I was really surprised last week to find out that two prospective tutors from my assessment days in Oxford and Cambridge were there, and I missed them. I’m pretty sure that in nine years of assessing, that’s never happened before, and it happened twice in a week! One of the problems with the assessments is that, because there in a public place, there’s no formal ‘waiting area’, but we try to choose quiet venues, and give very good instructions, which makes not finding a tutor practically impossible.
I’ve also been rethinking the way in which we recruit tutors at the moment. An applicant in Cambridge mentioned that the careers service advise against signing up to something where one is asked to pay a fee, and although we give applicants the choice not to pay a fee (if they’re happy to wait for an assessment in our style), I do understand the point. A massive benefit since introducing our new assessments is that applicants are much better prepared, and rarely miss their assessment times. Plus, the tutors who are more serious about actually doing any tutoring. However, I was looking at the stats and we used to assess more than 100 tutors in each of Oxford and Cambridge, and that number has dropped to around 40. I’ve clearly got to find some way of remedying this without wasting the time and money that we used to on the old style assessments, so I’m working on it.