Concerned that the ability to choose friends as tutors was allowing students to abuse the University's tutoring system, administrators have modified the system to ensure that the limited tutoring resources go to the students who actually need them.
Until recently, program administrators have lived with the risk that tutors could skirt responsibility by tutoring their friends, allowing them to make money without actually working.
The Brown University Tutoring Program has seen a considerable increase this year in requests for tutors for introductory-level classes popular among first-years and sophomores. The rise in applications coincided with a recent change in policy that denied students the ability to request a specific tutor.
In the past, the program had been able to manage demand, but the large number of students requesting tutors this semester was "very startling," said Gretchen Peterson, program coordinator of the Academic Support Center.
Each semester approximately 650 to 750 students apply for tutors for a wide variety of classes, according to statistics from the program office.
In response to this semester's increase in tutor requests, Peterson and other staff members decided to stop allowing students to choose a tutor in order to make the matching process more efficient and cut back on abuse. Before, when a student made a special request, a staff member had to make a manual change in the computer program used for assignments.
In previous semesters, program staff noticed some suspicious patterns among appointments and time records, which led them to believe that students were abusing the tutoring service.
Peterson said she had personally spoken with a number of students who she believed had been forging time sheets and using tutoring blocks to hang out with friends.
The staff even found one case where a student missed the class she had requested help in to meet with her tutor - leading them to question whether she really needed tutoring at all.
Peterson said that while this "atypical" misuse of the program was a problem, it was not the sole motivation for changing the request policy. More important was maintaining the fairness of the system.
"We don't want to give the appearance that some tutors are better than others," Peterson said, adding that she and her colleagues go to great lengths to ensure that all tutors are well qualified.
The tutoring program is part of the Academic Support Center and provides both group learning opportunities and individual sessions for students. The service is free for students, who only need to file an online application in order to be assigned a tutor. Tutors earn $8 per hour for a maximum of three hours weekly per student.
The program prefers that potential tutors have received an A in the class for which they hope to tutor and that tutors have a letter of recommendation from a professor of the subject they wish to teach. Potential tutors must also read a 14-page program manual.
This semester there are 480 tutors, most of whom were personally chosen by the tutoring service after consulting a list of transcripts sent to them by the registrar, according to Peterson.
News of the policy change came too late for some students, who had already begun the old application and had requested tutors of their choice.
"I requested a specific tutor for Math 19 and was denied," said Marina Rose Byrne-Folan '09, who took for granted that she would be able to choose a specific tutor at the beginning of the semester. Despite the setback, Byrne-Folan said that the tutor assigned to her is "really good" and has no complaints.
Hiroaki Tanaka '08, a tutor for the program, emphasized the good motives most tutors have.
"People who sign up don't just do it for the money," Tanaka said. He added that abuse did exist, but it was not as prevalent as some administrators claim and that trying to solve the problem by doing away with personal requests is "most inconvenient for the students."
The program is currently working to recruit enough tutors to meet demand.
Of the 60 unfilled tutor requests, approximately 75 percent are the result of a shortage of tutors in a certain subject. Currently, the greatest need is for tutors for CH 33: "Equilibrium, Rate and Change," followed by introductory math classes.
The remaining 25 percent of the unfilled requests are for obscure or upper-level classes for which the program does not have qualified tutors.
For students who do not receive a tutor, Peterson suggests alternative resources, including Departmental Undergraduate Groups.
Peterson expressed a concern that students are not making the best use of all the resources available to them, often falling back on the tutoring program for academic guidance.
"We are a support service, not a savior service," Peterson said.
In the future, the tutoring program plans to involve professors in the process so that more immediate and informative feedback will be available. It also intends to increase its free services - such as study skills and test preparation sessions - which are open to all students.
