Smarthinking Reviews

Cons

Pretty isolated - there is almost no contact with other employees. I'm part of a team of tutors, but there is absolutely no interaction expected or required among the tutors, and contact with the team lead is limited (one or two quality checks each semester, forwarding compliments from students about your writeups, the occasional note or change about the system/process/rubric).
Essay turnaround time expectations can be frustrating - e.g. I can easily average 30 min. turnarounds with 3-5 page high school/college analysis or persuasion essays, but covering 12 page nursing papers or random sections from the middle of dissertation chapters is a different story (hard to quickly give advice on a dissertation's main idea based on 8 pages from the middle of chapter 2!). This means it's a constant battle to try to make up time on the "easy" ones to offset going way long on the challenging ones, and it can be very frustrating to get a string of long ones in a row (and you have no idea what's coming until you select the next essay - imagine playing tetris but without the preview pane).
Low pay for the level of education and quality of work involved.

Cons

The unrealistic, 30- minute essay review time will easily lead to wage theft. For years, I altered my review times to meet the stated requirements. Another mainly live academic coaching( involving occasional proofreading) job I do pays 20 minutes per draft page and several more dollars an hour. Decent pay makes workers feel more valued and improves morale. Plus, it ensures well-educated people aren't struggling so much financially.

Cons

They pay $10/hr to people with an undergraduate degree, $11/hr to people with a graduate degree, and $12/hr to people with a doctorate. That's ridiculously low pay. I started working at Smarthinking with 2 years of tutoring experience under my belt, but my experience wasn't factored into my pay. I lived in New York City at the time, making $10/hr.

They only give part time tutors a max of 19 hours/week, but usually they give you less.

You have 30 minutes to respond to each essay. This includes reading the essay, embedding comments, and writing 2 pages of responses to the essay in order to help the student understand recurring issues. Tutors get warnings if their average time is over the 30-minute limit. Smarthinking encourages the use of templates to save time while simultaneously sending critical remarks when feedback isn't personal enough.

I received feedback maybe once or twice a semester, with no interaction with peers or anyone the rest of the time. They don't send you feedback from students unless it's positive, which never allowed me to actually know what my students needed in their sessions. It's an isolating work environment, and tutors are one stop along a conveyor belt. It's bad for the students and bad for the tutors.

Cons

Extreme micromanagement. Quality checks are frequent, and you can be at the mercy of an individual lead's quirks. I've gotten conflicting advice from one lead to another. The time you spend on each essay is also monitored automatically, and if you don't keep it to an average of 30 minutes, they get nasty very quickly.
A bazillion rules to remember, and they keep changing. Whenever you get an email that says "We're excited to introduce ...," you know you're in trouble.
Dehumanizing corporate atmosphere. They want robots that follow their rules, including the arbitrary ones, and don't add any creativity or intelligence to their tutoring.

Cons

The biggest con of working here has always been the 30 minute review time limit for essays. Too much is expected for a 30 minute review. The service expects such personalized responses for each essay, seemingly regardless of its length. It also harps on you if your productivity isn't up to their standards, cutting your hours as punishment. Then you get chastised in your reviews from your lead if you rely too much on templates so as to meet the time limit and up your productivity. It can feel like a no-win situation, which is incredibly stressful. I was also saddened to see they got rid of their handbook for specifically ESL writers. I had thought it was a good resource for those students to reference on their own time even if it wasn't always referenced in their particular essay reviews. Due to fixation on productivity, there really isn't enough time provided for proper professional development when it is given to you from a lead. I've had to do some of it on my own time, like further studying and reflecting. I have also been dismayed that over time the amount of hours a tutor can receive has drifted lower and lower from when I started, where a person could work up to but not 40 hours, to now when the maximum is 19 hours a week. There has also been no pay raises at all in the 7 years I have worked here.

Cons

The pay is awful and they are extremely strict about scheduling so the relative advantage of working from home is cancelled out.

Cons

The rules and protocols seem very "corporate," if you know what I'm saying. The 30-minute limit for assessment can be stressful at times.

Cons

As others have said, the requirements for comments on students' writing are very formulaic, and the expected time frame for completion of each session does not seem to be long enough for tutors to give the extensive, personalized feedback students deserve. In addition, the pay is relatively low for the educational background and speed required.

Cons

Pearson's organization and computerized learning systems require far too many hoops to jump through. They have an assembly line mentality for churning out reviews of student work based on a "formula" that honestly requires a checklist to maintain: font sizes, x number of this/x number of that, don't give more than one issue in each area, very little time even for lengthy or complex work (30 minutes per essay) and on and on. The nitpicking is ceaseless and they want an awful lot from PhD and master's level people for $11 an hour. If you crave actual interaction with humans, this job is NOT for you. There is a total disconnect from the company, also, and very little interaction from anyone until they rate your work and nitpick things that in the real world of teaching writing don't matter. Find a better opportunity if you can.

Cons

- Pay per hour for BA, MA, and PhD degrees is substantially low (ranging from $10-12/hr)..possible trade off for low stress and no commute, however, it is incredibly low for college graduates, especially those with graduate level degrees.
- There are no pay raises.
- Hours are not guaranteed. You may get all your hours in or they may ask you to drop hours because the work is slow. Further, when work is super busy they will ask for additional hours and you might get upwards of 30-40 hours in a week.
- Seasonal work based on the academic calendar: Calendar runs September through December, Mid-January through Mid-May, and then a choice of early or late summer.
- Only allowed 30 minutes to review academic submission no matter the length. So, if an essay is 10 pages or more, you not only have to read as much as you can, but you also have evaluate it and review it effectively in 30 minutes. This is not an easy task to do. If you go over the 30 minutes, Smarthinking will let you know via email if your times are not up to snuff and remind you to get it down to thirty minutes. In person tutoring for writing takes a minimum of an hour.
- If you use a template-type review, you will be called on it. They want each review to be original, however, templates are beneficial in keeping to the 30 minute allotment.
- If you need a lot of supervision and coddling to do your job, this is not the job for you.