Respuesta

Do Online Tutors Set Homework?

Good ones do, and it is smaller than parents expect: about half the session length, always checked, and always including something from three weeks ago.

Respuesta breve

Do online tutors set homework?

Good ones do, and it is small. Expect roughly half the session length in practice — enough to test whether the lesson stuck, not enough to turn into a second homework battle at home.

La respuesta corta
Most tutors set practice between sessions, and the ones who do not are leaving most of the gain unclaimed. A weekly class is a small fraction of a student's week; what converts it into a grade is the practice done alone, without a tutor there to prompt at the right moment. A workable quantity is about half the session length.

Qué cambia la respuesta

If the student is in an exam fortnight, the tutor should cut the practice rather than add to it.
If a student has stopped attempting anything at all, a month of deliberately no homework can be the right call — stated openly, not by silence.
If school homework is already unmanageable, the tutor should be told and should shrink the set, not the parent quietly dropping it.
If the practice is never checked in the following session, it will stop being done, and the student is being rational.

The arithmetic of one class a week

A ninety-minute class once a week is ninety minutes out of a waking week of around a hundred hours. Tuition cannot compete with school on volume and it is not trying to. What it can do is decide what the student practises, and then check that they did.

So the practice is not an extra imposition bolted on to the lesson. It is the mechanism by which the lesson becomes recall. Everything a tutor explains on Tuesday is understood on Tuesday; whether it is available on Friday depends entirely on whether it was retrieved in between, without help, from a blank page.

What good tutoring homework looks like

It is doable without help. If a parent has to teach it, the tutor pitched it wrong — practice is for consolidating something already understood, and a student who cannot start it will simply not do it and will feel worse about the subject.

It is not only this week's topic. A set of ten questions where seven are from today and three are from three weeks ago is far more useful than ten from today, because the three old ones are the only test of whether anything has stuck. Almost nobody sets homework this way and it costs nothing to start.

It is finite and written as a number. 'Exercise 7B, questions 1 to 12' is a task. 'Revise algebra' is a wish, and it converts reliably into nothing.

Doable alone — no adult teaching required.
Mixed: mostly the new topic, some deliberate revisiting of older ones.
Written down as specific questions with a number.
Checked at the start of the next session, every time.

How much, by stage

These are the quantities we set, and they are deliberately modest. The most common mistake in private tuition is setting a volume that looks serious to a parent and is abandoned by the student in week three.

The exam-year figure rises in the final term, when timed past-paper work replaces topic exercises and a single paper is ninety minutes on its own.

Grades 1–5: 10–15 minutes, three or four times a week. Frequency does the work at this age, not length.
Grades 6–8: 20–30 minutes per session taught.
GCSE and IGCSE: 30–60 minutes per session in normal term time; full timed papers in the final term.
Digital SAT: practice done to the module's own pace rather than untimed, because pacing is a large part of what the test measures.

What to do when nothing is being set

Ask one direct question: what should he do before Thursday? If the answer is vague twice in a row, the tutor is running lessons rather than a programme, and the difference will show up in about two months as steady attendance and a flat grade.

There are two legitimate exceptions and both should be stated rather than left to be inferred. One is exam fortnight, where adding work to a student sitting five papers a week is actively harmful. The other is the student whose relationship with the subject is damaged enough that the first month has to be about getting them to attempt anything at all — a real situation, and a deliberate choice a good tutor will explain to you in advance.

Silence is not either of those.

Preguntas frecuentes

School homework is already too much. Should we skip the tutor's?

Tell the tutor rather than quietly dropping it. The right response is to cut the set to its retrieval part — ten minutes of questions from earlier topics — which preserves the thing that matters and removes the volume. Dropping it entirely turns the tutoring back into weekly explanation.

Should I mark my child's tutoring homework?

No. The tutor needs to see the errors unedited, including the crossings-out and the abandoned attempt halfway down the page. A parent who corrects it first has removed the diagnostic information and left the tutor a clean page that says nothing.

What if my child says it is done and it is not?

That is the tutor's problem to catch, not yours to police. The fix is structural: the first ten minutes of the next class start with two questions from the set, which makes it immediately obvious. If your child can bluff the start of every class, the class is not being run tightly enough.

Do you set homework after every class?

After nearly every class, and we start the following one by going through it. Our classes are recorded partly for this reason: a student who got stuck at question 6 can be told exactly which minute of the previous class to re-watch before trying again.

Is more practice always better?

No. Past the point where a student is doing it attentively, extra volume produces copying, rushing, and answers written without working. Twenty focused minutes beats an hour of grinding, and a tutor who keeps increasing the quantity when results stall is treating a quality problem with volume.

Última actualización 21 de agosto de 2026