JEDDAH, 24 January 2006 — The end of each school semester is a boom time for tutors’ incomes. Private tuition is seen by many parents and students as the most effective way to bring students up to exam readiness in the shortest possible time. Students make up for the whole semester’s school lessons by engaging tutors to help them in preparations for forthcoming exams in spite of the high fees.
Individual tuition fees reach SR125 per hour or more. Tutors of a science subject — math, physics and chemistry — can command SR4,000 to SR5,000 per subject for a course.
“My son, who is in the 11th grade, is an average student. He asks me to find him just a math tutor before his exams,” said Abu Haitham. “His Arab tutor charges SR125 per hour during this time,” he added.
Haitham depends on his tutor to revise the math curriculum with him. “I revise the whole curriculum with my tutor. In each class, which lasts for two hours, we try to go through each chapter of the curriculum until I make sure I understood everything in it,” Haitham said. “It takes around 10 classes to revise it,” he added.
While students find tutors the best assistance in their studying, some teachers think that it is better for students to use their personal efforts during school days and depend on the school teachers instead of tutors.
“Students who depend on their tutors during the year usually block their brains from understanding whatever is explained in school classes knowing that the tutor will explain the information they didn’t catch during the class,” said Salma Sharaf Al-Deen, high school teacher. She suggested that schools should make tutorial classes for students so that they can have more time to discuss the lessons with the teachers.
Some students blame schoolteachers for not offering a good quality teaching at schools. “If we don’t acquire well-taught information from schoolteachers, we will ask for help from tutors as a normal reaction,” said Mai Salman, a 12th-grader. “Tutors focus more on their students and try to explain every unclear point to them.”
Not every teaching experience with a tutor is, however, positive. Some tutors claim that they can predict the exam questions; students who depend on these predictions are sometimes hugely disappointed. Others provide students with wrong information causing them to drop grades in exams.
Marwa Khaled, a university student, took advice over a point of Arabic grammar from her tutor. In the exam, she answered it as advised and it turned out to be wrong. “I wished I didn’t ask her because I already had the correct answer for the question.”
