How many of us have sat up late at night, struggling over schoolwork, whether it is an essay, a complex mathematical problem, or challenging reading? How nice would it be to snap our fingers and have an academic genie appear, ready to help us? How many educators have also wished that their students had such help?
That fantasy is something of a reality now that on-call tutoring services are available online. A simple Google search reveals dozens of online tutoring providers, all promising speedy and accurate help. But these companies don’t do this for the pure joy of teaching. The online tutoring industry is just that – an industry, designed to make money. Big money: according to James Marshall Crotty on Forbes.com, the online tutoring industry is currently valued at about $102 billion dollars a year, its rapid growth a result of the “failure” of parents and schools “to intellectually prepare students for not only collegiate success, but for life.”
But does online tutoring actually prepare students, or does the profit motive reign supreme and create ethical dilemmas for tutors, educators, and students? Crotty cites a study in which “more than 90% of Tutor.com students reported improved grades and even improved confidence levels from online tutoring.” But what’s behind those improved grades and that higher level of confidence? Can we actually assess student learning – or does online tutoring simply constitute a new way of cheating?
To find out, I went “undercover,” so to speak, at one of the newer online tutoring services (I won’t provide the name of the service here) to get the scoop on what it offers clients, what students expect, and what online tutors actually do. Sadly, the service fulfilled all my worst fears – and suggests that “online tutoring” may not always be actual tutoring, which is supposed to be additional instruction, not the completion of student work for them. Instead, online tutoring seems less like “instruction” and more like a fee-based content-delivery system in which students pay other people to do their academic work for them, generating huge profits for the companies but not much learning for the students.
Cloak and Keyboard Adventures: My Secret Life as an Online Tutor
I applied to be a tutor for one online company about three months ago. They asked for a scanned copy of my diploma. I was not about to take out my framed doctorate, and told them that. So they just approved me. No questions asked, no transcripts required. Not that such documents could actually guarantee my credentials, because as we know from recent scandals in academia, it’s relatively easy to create fake degrees and transcripts. You can even buy legitimate-looking fake degrees of all kinds online. So virtually anyone can be hired by a service that only requires scanned documents as credentials. I also found that as soon as I was “hired,” I had a rating of 8 out of 10. I had not completed any assignments, yet was already a highly-rated tutor.
Let me state at the outset that I never accepted a tutoring assignment from this online provider. The process is simple: tutors are notified of possible assignments, which they then have to bid on. Tutors can ask questions before they submit their bid, but once they do, they are in competition with one another to win the assignment. My observations on this experience are based strictly on the assignments made available to me, and two problems were immediately evident:
- Not one of the tutoring requests I was offered were for legitimate tutoring. The site itself claims that it provides personal writing coaches, who will “help you brainstorm a paper topic, find the appropriate research, and even give you a detailed critique of all drafts of your written work.” It claims that tutors will help students “with grammar and sentence structure, help you check for accuracy, word choice, and critique and give you our reactions to your work product. We can also translate, reword, rephrase, and reconfigure text.” But this is what the requests I received looked like: “I need a four page essay on the topic question below. Materials will be attached.)” When I responded to this request asking what kind of help the student wanted with the assignment, the student never responded. The sad conclusion I came to was that the student didn’t want “help”- he or she wanted tutors to simply write the paper.
- The company does not take any ethical responsibility for the service it provides and how academic honesty will be honored by tutors and students. It addressed academic honesty by stating that students should adhere to their school’s academic honesty policies, and that “the risk you take by violating your school’s code of academic integrity is not worth the reward. The explanations we provide should only serve as a preliminary reference and as a supplement to your regular study regimen. It is your responsibility to make sure you follow your university’s code of academic integrity.” Honor, though, tends to fade into the background when there’s no enforcement policy in place. There was no indication anywhere on the site that the company monitored how students used the tutoring. However, there is oversight of the work the tutors do to make sure that they haven’t plagiarized, “to ensure that the work you receive is original.” Tutors are not allowed to plagiarize, but customers…er, I mean “students”…can take the original work written by the tutor and use it as their own. It’s clear that entire papers could be written for students, rather than students submitting their own original work and getting assistance understanding how to improve it.
This is only one company, though. Are other online tutoring services just as problematic? There are many indications that online tutoring has been troublesome since it began. Perusal of consumer complaint websites indicate that everything from financial fraud to incorrect and inadequate information has been provided to students at many of the more prominent online tutoring sites, including Tutor Vista, BoostMyGrades.com, Transtutors, and many others.
It’s also very clear when you read these consumer complaint sites that students really do expect to buy completed academic work to submit as their own. As one student wrote of his experience with Transtutors,
“I had submitted two assignments on transtutors.com. Everything seemed to be perfect. I could easily search for my topics; submit my assignments and queries, a tutor was assigned, etc…Got one of my assignments back. It was done nicely, in fact to perfection, quality stuff…It was very well written…He did research a lot, the writing was so professional.”
I have read countless reviews like this one, in which the student praises the company for providing him or her with high quality essays and papers – not for assistance writing their own.
The Problem with Online Tutoring
The sad conclusion I am forced to make after my investigation is that online “tutoring” can be, in many instances, just a way for students to commit academic fraud. Online tutor Anna Degg confirmed this in 2011 when she wrote about her experience on Yahoo:
“I have been finding more and more students who are giving their tutors (myself included) a copy of their assignments via a word document and asking the tutor how much they would charge to complete the work. Some tutoring sites are very proactive about making sure their tutors are only helping students learn and not just giving answers. Others are turning a blind eye in order to make money.”
Nothing has changed since 2011. Online tutoring is simply yet another tool that the Internet revolution, while making new educational options available, also makes new corruptions of education possible.
Some simple changes might help make this problem go away:
- Colleges should require companies that offer tutoring and academic support to notify schools when their students avail themselves of these services. In many instances, I would bet that student loan money that students uses to finance their education and living expenses while in college is also used to finance any kind of academic support, so requiring such disclosures should be mandatory. I know that many people will argue that this would be impossible to manage, but such a requirement might at least act as a deterrent to some students, who would be afraid to be caught cheating.
- Educators can also employ methods that will root out plagiarism. I often require students to write an essay in class and submit that work as a sample upon which future assignments can be assessed. Similar assignments can also be completed in real time in online courses. Impressive advances in vocabulary, argumentation, and comprehension seldom happen overnight, and I’ve caught many a cheater by simply pointing out the vast differences between different samples of his or her work.
Neither one of these options may catch all instances of cheating, of course. But it’s clear that educators need to spend some time reviewing and investigating online tutoring, teaching our students about ethics and honesty, and making sure that they view their academic work as an opportunity to learn and grow, and not simply an impediment to their degrees and future careers. Students also need to remember that education is about learning, not just scoring a degree by the easiest means possible.
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