Tutors are NOT effective
January 17, 2019
When students enter high school, the workload increases with more AP or college level classes that require significant time commitment, making it harder to cope with the stress of maintaining grades that meet expectations.
To help their children, parents often hire tutors to support students in achieving academic success. However, this is not necessarily the best course of action for every student’s academic future.
Tutoring has benefits because students can review content learned at school again in order to clarify misunderstandings and get personalized time with private tutors to work on the subject. Despite these short-term benefits, hiring a tutor can also lead to students receiving good grades but not effectively learning.
“Tutoring is expensive, the things that you can already do by yourself, it’s not worth getting tutors,” junior Yunseong Jung said. “I think most people don’t really know if they actually need tutoring or not so. You don’t learn when you are getting tutored. People expect their tutor to do everything for them.”
According to Reader’s Digest, while tutors are good for reviewing concepts or helping students comprehend new lessons, tutors can end up editing every piece of work a student submits and do their work for them. By setting this precedent that the student’s personally produced work is simply not sufficient, it can create a dependency on others and debilitate the learning capabilities of the student.
A tutor can cause problems for students due to a common belief that a tutor will eliminate the need to do extra work, and thus stop working as hard which can lead to bad results. While many tutors do a wonderful job actually helping students, parents run the risk that their child’s mentality may start to change, giving them an inflated confidence and possibly having a negative impact on the student.