Tutor.com Employee Reviews about "schedule"

Cons

The perk of this position is that you get to help teach if you enjoy that kind of thing and have extreme flexibility in when and where you do it. They mandate a minimum of 5 hours a week, which is crazy to me. One week I can be on all day and all week while another week I cannot login at all. So much for the flexibility. They did not initially explain scheduling hours so I would just log on whenever I could to get my minimum 5 hours a week. It was a complete waste of time because you don't get paid to just sit there and wait for a tutor session. If you're in a low demand subject my wife, you're not going to get any tutors. I think she went over three months without a single tutor and she was logged in all day every single day. We finally realized you could schedule hours and get paid a tiny bit of money for waiting during those hours. 1/4 of your regular pay rate is terrible considering you don't get paid much at all anyway. We are talking about a couple of bucks for waiting five hours or more for tutors. Anyway, if you go back and get more subject exams passed, you can definitely increase your chances of getting a tutor. We thought we finally had this figured out and things were going okay. It was an easy way to make a little extra money for not really having to do anything. My wife and I travel a lot so we could set our phones at hotspots and connect the laptop from there to gain some hours and tutors. We had to make a move out of state and I was unemployed for quite a while so I started logging in all day every day and scheduling hours so I was making something finally. If you get high ratings and things like that you get small bonuses per session. I think the most I made was about $450 one month, but I was working it like a full-time job. This works if you have literally no other income but it is not worth it if you're already making money elsewhere. In the beginning, you're assigned a mentor and they check your reviews and tell you things you can do better. I never really had any major issues with anything but there was a week I did not get my minimum 5 hours and they threatened to terminate my account. I told them go ahead because this was just supposed to be something extra for me to do in my time and if they are going to act like that I want no part of their company. They immediately corrected themselves and never gave me a problem again about hours. Granted, this was only one time. I'm sure if you never logged in they would in fact terminate you, but overall I think as long as you put in some effort you'll be fine. After my introductory phase they promoted me to intermediate tutor. They do not have any clear milestones for when you can get promoted and there is almost no information out there about it. I got a small pay raise with this which made me happy and helped me a lot with that one month of $450. Unfortunately, depending on your mentor, you probably won't ever get promoted. I got lucky with my mentor but my wife continued working at tutor.com long after me and she never got promoted. She had better ratings than I did. Her mentor was always extremely rude and would never answer questions. No matter what my wife asked, the mentor would just send a copy of the same piece of paper with no information on it. It is purely luck of the draw which mentor you get and that can change in a heart beat. They seriously need to streamline their promotion system and they need to do away with some of these mentors. They are truly awful. In order to schedule hours, you have to login on a specific day of the week. It changes every week so you have to keep your eyes open. You better login right about 11 AM EST so you can get some of the hours you want to work. If you think you can schedule hours after your day job or something, think again. Someone else will have already grabbed those time slots. You're competing against every other tutor they have. I don't know how many they have, but I'm sure it is a lot. You can only schedule 6 hours by the way. It works fine if you can use those hours for your mandatory 5 hours a week. At least you're making 1/4 of your hourly rate waiting for students. Then, on Saturdays at 11 AM EST, you can login again and pick up additional hours (up to 56 hours total). That sounds awesome. Except, the second you login (right at 11 AM on the dot), all the hours will be gone. Someone out there must have a program or software that automatically goes in at 11 AM and grabs every single available slot. There is no way that all those slots are gone at 11:00:01 AM. As for actually tutoring, it is the expected struggle of the job. I had students on the college level that do not know anything about the subject they are studying. They don't even know how to write papers. They select the wrong categories all the time and just expect you to do the work for them. You're likely going to get bad ratings if you don't do the work for them, but then you'll get fired because you violated tutor.com policy. The students do not seem to realize we are not affiliated with their school and do no know what their assignment details are. 90% of all my tutor sessions were students trying to make heads or tails of their instructor's assignment directions. Most of the time I couldn't figure it out either. Most of these institutions have have a 1 hour time limit for each session and that is not enough time for most cases. If you go over the time limit, you'll get in trouble. If you go under the time limit, you might as well just be telling the student "I can't help you and I have to go. Good luck." What is the point? Then on the other hand I had K-12 students and they were, ironically, the easiest ones to work with. They never have actual questions about school, they just log in and ask random questions about life in general. Why are there different countries? Why is slime green? They are easy to work with, but it isn't worth your time honestly. Most sessions are text-based so you're just typing back and forth with students. You'd be surprised how many college students are completely illiterate. It makes it impossible to communicate with them. Any voice session is a disaster because you can't really show them anything and they always have so much background noise and poor English that you cannot get anywhere. I got to the point where I just denied voice sessions entirely. The real problems start when it comes to the fingerprinting. I started a month before my wife did and I was not mandated to get them. They offered a small pay raise to get your fingerprints done and submitted so you can tutor students in California. I planned on getting them done eventually but never really got around to it. Somehow, my wife was mandated to get fingerprinted. My wife repeatedly asked why she has to get fingerprinted and I didn't, but they refused to answer that question. It made me suspicious that they did not actually make a policy mandating it, but rather they just wanted her to get fingerprinted because her mentor was a pain in the neck. My wife tried numerous times to get their portal to work, but it was such a buggy system that she could never get anywhere. Not to mention the only information is for California residents and we were nowhere near California. It was a nightmare. Finally my wife just ended up ignoring it and they terminated her account. She was in contact with supervisors and other mentors, all of which proved to be just as useless at providing information. Finally, after constant emails back and forth with the same copy/paste information they kept spewing out, they agreed to reactivate her account if she got fingerprinted within a week. She agreed and could not get any information from them on how to do this because their portal did not work. They seemed to act like they didn't believe their precious portal was completely inoperable. They told her, just go to an identigo location, get fingerprints printed on ink cards, send those cards to some address in California so they can do the background. The day came to finally get fingerprinted and I agreed to go as well just to get it out of the way. It seemed like they were going to end up mandating it anyway so I might as well get it done. We got our prints and returned home to send everything in, but then they told us after the fact that we needed the fingerprinting operator to sign a piece of paper attesting to who we were. You tell us this now? I was done at that point. I refused to get printed or even try this. They were going to reimburse us the cost of fingerprinting and I decided to just eat the cost because this had turned into a catastrophe and I wanted nothing to do with this company anymore. My wife continued to try to make it work but ultimately, she couldn't get anywhere either. It was one thing after the next and nowhere near the headache. It was proving to cost more money out of our pockets to tutor than we were ever going to make anyway. It helped me buy gas when I didn't have a job, but that was about it. The people running this company have absolutely no idea what is going on. They are the most unhelpful people I have ever had the displeasure of working for. Above all, their software only works about 50% of the time and everything in their portal is broken. I can attest that this is not scam company, but it might as well be with how bad they are at general operations. It was one of the best days of my life when I told them I no longer wanted to tutor for them.

Cons

Sometimes hours are hard to get. You have to deal with rude students on occasion. Work isn't intellectually challenging. Tutor.com doesn't allow you to list them as a reference.