Hey Rine x,

Great question, and hopefully I can give you a tutor's perspective (but, please, students chime in about your experiences!).

To be quite honest, I'm surprised at how often the economics of tutoring simply don't work for either party, so my first piece of advice for anyone considering tutoring is to make sure that you have a plan for what you want to accomplish in your tutoring sessions.

Here's how I see it:

-I get paid pretty much the same for an hour of tutoring as for an hour of teaching a classroom class, but the student typically pays about 3x as much for tutoring because there aren't other students to absorb the rest of the cost.

-If we're simply "covering the material", I'm definitely not going to talk 3x faster to give you more value out of the tutoring session than you'd get from the class, as just "talking faster" is irresponsible for everyone.

-Accordingly, in order to get more value per hour of tutoring we need to make sure that we're using the time specifically to work on particular strategies/question types/etc. that you absolutely need to work on.

So...in order for tutoring to make economic sense for you, you should really have an idea before you register for it of what, specifically, you need to work on.

Session-to-session, you should plan on spending 4-5x as much time on homework as you do on meeting with a tutor so that, again, you can come to each session with specific questions and areas of emphasis. I always tell my students "if you're not sure about whether we should meet, we probably shouldn't", meaning that if they haven't done enough homework to have some burning things to share - practice test results, particular questions that stumped them, etc. - then it's probably not worth their time/money for us to sit at Starbucks and just work through problems together. To that end, make sure that your tutor assigns specific homework so that you're working conscientiously toward your goals - your tutor should have some favorite problems or homework sets that will help diagnose what you need to work on.

So I'd say:

Good reasons to work with a tutor:

You have specific areas of the test that you need to emphasize

You need help diagnosing which specific areas you need to work on

Your schedule/style doesn't really fit a classroom structure but you are more than willing and able to put in homework time between sessions to extract value from a tutor


Reasons that you'd be better off with a classroom course:

You pretty much need help everywhere on the test

You need more "face time" and regular meetings with an instructor to stay on pace and therefore would benefit from more frequent, standard meetings at a lower cost

You need plenty of work on basic skills - you pay a good GMAT tutor way too much to have them teach you basic algebra or geometry that the public school system would give you for free!



I love tutoring and have had some great success stories, but usually it's when the student already has some specific items in mind to emphasize and I can help direct that process. Honestly, I pretty much hate when someone signs up for 14 hours of tutoring without any real focus in mind...mainly because I feel guilty trying to create a responsible syllabus that is conscious of what someone paid and the value I want them to get out of it. In those cases, I'd much rather that someone take a classroom course or self-study program first and then come back to me with specifics in mind - I just feel guilty accepting someone's hard-earned money when I know that I'm not in a position to add the kind of value that they should expect.