How to tell if a tutor is good or for real

1. Request to see evidence of the tutor's qualifications

Please check the tutor's qualifications. Request to see the original degree certificates, university transcripts and/or employment letters.

If he/she claims to be currently teaching in a certain school, his/her name should be found on the school website. Certificates or MOE cards can be faked, so ask for the school's most recent yearbook and request to see his/her picture inside. If he/she claims to be an ex teacher of a school, request for the yearbook of the school he/she was last teaching in, and request to look at his/her picture inside.

There are many tutors who claim to be full-time teachers, when they might in fact be relief teachers or AED teachers. Some parents are willing to pay up to $80-$120 per hour for school teachers. No wonder some tutors claim to be school teachers even when they're not! If you are a parent who is willing to fork out such a large sum of money to hire a full-time school teacher, it makes sense to get the tutor to give you the full confidence that they are indeed what they claim to be.

Most tuition centres will pay $40-50 an hour for a hired tutor. Often, if the tuition centres are desperate for more tutors, they will hire anyone who claims to be able to teach or with the qualifications. Some tuition centres' tutors are A levels graduates, polytechnic graduates or graudates.

In Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers. In one of its chapters, he explains the 10,000-hour rule. This rule states that people accrued 10,000-hours of practice to be masters in their skills. It took me four years of teaching day and night to be able to realise how to improve students' grade in biology and chemistry.

2. Know how the tutor conducts the class and if there is any discipline. There are many tutors out there for the money, thinking tutition is easy money. So many new tuition centres opened every year. Not all tuition centres are bad in conducting lessons.

There are some tutors that will gather students from different levels and try to teach them one by one in a large group. The tutor will only assist them when they have problems. On average for a group of 10 students, one student only get few mins of attention on average out of a 2h tution. Only a very small group can work out with this form of teaching method.

Some tutors allow the students to sms, talk, after all they had paid and money is what they are after. Check your child's hp. If they sent out many smses or whatapps messages during tuition timing, you know the tutor does not care.

There are some students who will remain in this type of tuition, they do not have to be scolded by the tutor by not paying attention. Tuition is relaxing to them, after all parents thought they are studying hard when they are going for tuition regularly. Check your child's work. See how much or what he had done during tuition.

3. Your child's work  must be marked by the tutor. What is a good tutor if he or she does check on his student's work and point out his mistakes, This is also a good way to check on the tutor to see if he can spot the mistakes the student made,

4. Beware of too much or desperate advertisements. The better the marketing, the more exaggerating the boasting, the more caution you must be. Focus is not on tutoring, but on attracting students into the tuition for the money. Some tutors spam the forums for students.

5. Update parents.

A good tutor will update parents about the progress of the student, like never do homework and not scare of the student getting angry and terminate the tuition which many centres are afraid as they have a rental to pay every month.

6, Improvements in grade. If this is not achieved in a year, can say bye to the tutor. I also tell my students to look for other tutors if they cannot improve under me.