For-Profit Education Tools Continue to be Predatory to Teachers and Tutors
Pros
You can set your own hours and work your own shifts. This is fantastic for those who have been impacted by COVID-19. Honestly, the flexability and ability to work from home is really the only positive. If you like working with students as well, this will give you plenty of experience. The issue comes with the fact that, since you are doing anonymous one-time sessions, you don't really get to evaluate student progress over-time and many students thus expect you to do the work for them.
Cons
The Princeton Review and Tutor.com have predatory hiring practices and are generally terrible to their tutors. First of all, no matter your experience, your starting pay will always be in the 10 dollar range. I have been promoted once at this job and my pay only rose to 13.50 an hour. This is significantly less than students or universities are charged on every plan. You are required to get certified for quality insurance. This is great, but the certification process really highlights how poorly tutors are paid. Likewise, there's no paid training. You are expected to train yourself. If you do not, then you will be evaluated and have subjects that you can teach eliminated if you aren't fired completely. This practice ensures that tutor.com does not have to pay for new hires by training them, meaning that they can have rapid and instaneous employee turnover and not care about the standards or well-being of long and short-term employees alike. Also, there's no interaction with anyone besides your singular "quality specialist." This person writes reviews for you about what you are doing right and wrong. This is the only feedback you will obtain. There's no way to communicate with fellow tutors, meaning there's no way to negotiate pay increases or properly unionize to demand better payment for what counts as specialized work. Tutor.com likewise doesn't feel any pressure to change. They hire quite frequently, and fire just as frequently. Truly, they are a company that has taken advantage of the vulnerability of those unemployed during COVID-19. I would strongly suggest not working here. Take any other option you can. If you can't, then understand that it's temporary when you feel like an underpaid cog in the wheel when you're desperately trying to teach an area you aren't certified in to a student that's fighting you for less than 10 dollars.
