10th May 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A popular criticism of the tuition industry is that tutors are hired to do students’ coursework for them. There is an unmonitored aspect to private tutoring which leaves a bad taste in the mouth when a tutored student hands in a flawless piece of coursework, or any assessed work which counts towards the student’s overall grade.
Obviously a tutor doing a student’s coursework is absolutely wrong, and we have very clear guidelines on how to handle a situation when a student or parent asks their tutor for help with coursework. Interestingly, though, many parents don’t see the request as something which is off limits, maybe because they already have a warped view of private tuition.
We have known parents complain about their child’s exam result even after lauding their tutor when the tuition stopped. The perception is that the exam result is being paid for, and when the desired result doesn’t follow, it is the tutor’s fault; why did they pay all this money if not for the top grade?
We don’t share the view that private tuition is essentially paying for an exam result, but we can see that if someone does have that view, it’s an easy step to go from there to feeling less morally compromised when a tutor does a student’s coursework for them. If one can pay for a better exam result, why not also for a better coursework grade?
It is difficult to change the view of people who see tuition differently from us, but, to be honest, those people probably aren’t our target audience. It’s so nice when parents talk to us about an improvement in their child’s understand, confidence and, as a result, happiness. We’re probably not as attractive a group to work with when we have to explain to parents that tutoring through us is not a shortcut to anything, and we certainly can’t guarantee a particular grade; assessed work is all a student’s achievement.