Just terrible for tutors who work for them. I worked as a tutor for them and can say that they treat their tutors like trash and underpay them (they pay $20/hr while most senior tutors can make $40-50/hr, especially if they live in high-income areas), but worst of all they only care about your tutor ratings and don’t give a shit about the true quality of tutoring you provide, and while fire tutors if they receive more than about 4 or 5 “unhelpful” ratings on their records and without giving tutors a chance to work out th e reason for negative feedback with their students (and have it removed, like can be done on eBay, since most of the time the bad feedback is probably due to a misunderstanding and not a lack of knowledge from the tutor) or with their management people (once they fire you they’ll just ignore all your e-mails). This is problematic since most students on InstaEdu just want tutors to give them the answers or do their homework, and aren’t interested in tutors contributing to their genuine learning. Tutors who do the latter are more likely receive the “unhelpful” ratings since they didn’t provide the answers to the students right away. Their pay-by-the-minute model is also not conducive to learning or tutoring since it forces the student to rush the tutor for the answers while giving tutors the incentive to prolong a session just so they can make a few extra bucks. They also don’t provide bonus incentives to their tutors like many competitors do, yet still expect them to have maintain near perfect ratings from their students, don’t compensate more senior tutors (so they end up with mostly shitty quality undergrads looking to make a quick buck rather the more serious and experienced graduate or professional students or students with advanced degrees that could be doing the tutoring instead) They’d be much better off just sticking to a traditional pay-by-the-hour approach and having a tiered pay system for their tutors. Otherwise I can see them going out of business in a fairly short amount of time.
Bottom line, stay away from them whether you are potential tutor or student.
Just terrible for tutors who work for them. I worked as a tutor for them and can say that they treat their tutors like trash and underpay them (they pay $20/hr while most senior tutors can make $40-50/hr, especially if they live in high-income areas), but worst of all they only care about your tutor ratings and don’t give a shit about the true quality of tutoring you provide, and while fire tutors if they receive more than about 4 or 5 “unhelpful” ratings on their records and without giving tutors a chance to work out th e reason for negative feedback with their students (and have it removed, like can be done on eBay, since most of the time the bad feedback is probably due to a misunderstanding and not a lack of knowledge from the tutor) or with their management people (once they fire you they’ll just ignore all your e-mails). This is problematic since most students on InstaEdu just want tutors to give them the answers or do their homework, and aren’t interested in tutors contributing to their genuine learning. Tutors who do the latter are more likely receive the “unhelpful” ratings since they didn’t provide the answers to the students right away. Their pay-by-the-minute model is also not conducive to learning or tutoring since it forces the student to rush the tutor for the answers while giving tutors the incentive to prolong a session just so they can make a few extra bucks. They also don’t provide bonus incentives to their tutors like many competitors do, yet still expect them to have maintain near perfect ratings from their students, don’t compensate more senior tutors (so they end up with mostly shitty quality undergrads looking to make a quick buck rather the more serious and experienced graduate or professional students or students with advanced degrees that could be doing the tutoring instead) They’d be much better off just sticking to a traditional pay-by-the-hour approach and having a tiered pay system for their tutors. Otherwise I can see them going out of business in a fairly short amount of time.
Bottom line, stay away from them whether you are potential tutor or student.