Should a tutor have 2400?

pwcpeng
Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:20:36 +0000

Ideally, yes. But a 2400 is not enough. In fact, the other much more important part of the equation to picking a good tutor outweighs a less than 2400 score.

That factor is how WELL that tutor can analyze specific students and get those students to understand. Doing well on the test is a wholly different skill set than being able to convey those abilities to a student.

Just because a tutor knows how to solve a math question a certain way, perhaps the “mathy” academic way…doesn’t mean his student will. And if this is a low-scoring student, trying to force the student to learn the mathy way is ridiculous. Instead, a good tutor needs to know when to adapt and teach this low-scoring student a more nimble strategy such as plugging in the answers or making up his own values for the variables and trying it out.

A tutor must also be likeable and relatable. He must be understanding and caring. He must be patient.

He must be able to spot the trends a student is doing over and over. A good tutor must be able to organize a curriculum and adapt because simply going over a giant list of questions spawning a bunch of concepts is completely unhelpful. You must organize the session around individual concepts, one at a time. A good tutor must not simply show a student the steps, but ask guiding questions to get the student to think for himself. Brute memorization of a bunch of steps does not work because then the student gets trained in one very specific type of question. When he tries to apply this to another similar, but different question, those steps won’t work anymore. A good tutor gets his student to think nimbly.

Finally, a good tutor must be encouraging.

As far as scores go, as long as the tutor has higher than the target score, I think it’s good enough. The other factors above are much more important.