Complaint Review: Wyzant - Chicago Illinois

I signed up as a tutor on the Wyzant site and qualified to tutor in 60 subject areas.  Nevertheless, no matter what I did to try to entice people to my profile, nothing was successful.  They eventually deleted my tutor page, into which I had put time, effort, and money (which I spent on a background check, which I passed, and which they would not refund after deleting my profile).  The vast majority of tutoring opportunities that came my way were either college students who needed assistance that was beyond my expertise or people that wanted help with something very specific that was again, beyond my area of expertise.  Most of the "tutor wanted" posts were in mathematics, engineering, and accounting, none of which am I qualified to teach.  Many people wanted the same tutor for both mathematics and English, which probably won't result in the best tutoring.

I taught a total of one session.  The subject matter was a philosophy survey course.  The student lived with his older sister, who arranged everything.  She was clearly dissatisfied with me from the get-go because I was not able to tutor off the top of my head.  All my previous tutoring experience was with helping students understand difficult material, not trying to teach people off the top of my head in fields that are auxiliary to my own study.  The course had no textbook, so I used Wikipedia.  I understood the material fully, and had to keep reconceptualizing it in order to get the student to understand.  He kept wanting to reinterpret the philosopher's theory into something opposite to what it was, perhaps to fit it in more with his personal beliefs. Neither he nor his sister seemed to undersand that you don't have to agree with the philosopher--the point is to understand what they're saying so that you can challenge it, if necessary, and some of the philosophers came from an atheistic point of view with which they were in total disagreement, causing them both to constantly reconstrue what I was trying to explain.   I was in no way endorsing any of the philosophers under discussion, just trying to make sure that the student understood what the philosopher was saying.  I asked for feedback, but she provided none and was advertising for another tutor.  Apparently, she wasn't so dissatisfied that she wanted to leave negative feedback that could have hurt me.

Wyzant removed my profile from the site once before, but restored it at my request.  Wyzant rejected my request to restore it the second time.  Unless you are a whiz at math and engineering, don't sign up for this site.

Wyzant takes 40% of your fee, but that amount reduces as you teach more sessions.  It seems that their goal is to make sure that no one teaches enough sessions for them to not collect the maximum amount of money.