What Makes An Effective Tutor?

Part 1: Hiring the Right People

What makes an effective tutor?

For the past five years, we have obsessed over that question. Through our work with hundreds of students, tutors of all sorts, and private SAT tutors, we feel pretty confident now that we’ve got it figured out. Though every student’s struggle and road to improvement is unique, our success has been drawn from adhering to a few basic principles of how student improvement really happens.

Let’s begin with hiring. What are the qualities that any tutor must have to be effective?

1. Freshness with and experience teaching the subject or subjects they will be working with – it doesn’t matter how good you were at chemistry in high school, if you haven’t done it in the last year, you will be rusty.


2. The natural ability to teach – some people have it, and some people just don’t. A good tutor can get inside the head of a student, view the material from the student’s perspective, and adjust his or her teaching accordingly.


3. A personality to connect with at least one type of student and the passion to do so – if you’re in the student’s home purely to pay your bills, the student can usually tell.

A tutor who does not possess all three of these qualities should never be hired.