What's the best online tutor for your kids' needs? Who is the best online tutoring company? Who can you trust to deliver on their promises when it comes to online tutoring?
I have no idea. But I can tell you for a fact that it's NOT Varsity Tutors. If you know a company that does what they say they will, has tutors who show up at appointed times and aren't constantly trying to reschedule then I'd love to hear about them. I don't normally spend time complaining because life is too short but I wanted to take a minute and share our family's terrible experience with varsity tutors in the hopes that others will avoid the same.
We are moving this summer and the new school our kids will attend requires the ISEE - a test and a test format my kids have never experienced. We realized they needed some help when the children did horrifically on the practice test so we searched the internet and found Varsity Tutors. We talked to them about out short timeline - we only had a couple weeks before the test - and they assured us they would get our kids ready. We purchased a block of time, spending thousands of dollars, because we were assured that not only would Varsity Tutors get the children ready but they would start immediately and make it happen in our timeline. That all sounded great but it fell apart quickly.
First they scheduled for our third grader - the session was going to start at 8 pm. That was not what we talked about because they go to bed at that time, but hey, no big deal we rescheduled for the next day. They didn't have a tutor second grader but promised they would get one the next day. Well, we did start with the older child the next day and it went reasonably well but IT TOOK 8 DAYS for them to finally get a tutor for our younger child. More than half the time we had allowed. Oh, and while we were killing the little time we had the tutors for our older child no-showed and rescheduled more often than they actually kept an appointment. A couple times they messaged to tell us "they weren't feeling well" within 2 minutes of the appointed time... Yeah, right!
Again, I hate to complain and moan but dealing with Varsity Tutors has been incredibly frustrating, expensive and, most importantly, a time suck when time was of the essence as we stated before signing up. On the upside, today is the last day of tutoring before the kids take their test... and the tutor just sent a text to my wife to say she needed to change the deal... AGAIN! Well, I've had all I can take so I called the main number and they pulled up my account as I explained my displeasure with Varsity Tutors... and they proceeded to tell me how this was our fault! I guess so seeing has how we are not computer experts, we have never done online tutoring before, they told us they would take care of everything and walk us through it and get our kids ready and we are paying thousands of dollars... this certainly seems to indicate we are the reason they couldn't find a tutor for over a week for one child and kept scheduling and rescheduling the other.
Ok so I'm done. My hope in taking the time to write this is that others will avoid the experience our family had. It's not just the money it's the time. Time that we will never get back.
PS Please let me know if you have a tutoring company that is reliable as I think we would like to continue with this information channel now that we have an idea of how it COULD work. read more