By Kathryn Abbate | Guest Contributor
The Center for Academic Success and Engagement offers tutoring opportunities and resources for Baylor students. Options include free one-on-one tutoring, which is limited to 30 minutes, and group sessions can meet once a week for an hour. However, there need to be more available times for group tutoring, and one-on-one sessions need to be longer.
The Tutoring Center provides many resources for a student who is seeking help. However, the length of one-on-one sessions should be extended to an hour instead of 30 minutes. Students have a hard time grasping concepts in a short period of time.
One-on-one sessions should be at least an hour since students are taking time out of their day to meet with people who are willing to help them with their academic success. While our expectations are to get stuff done in 30 minutes, sometimes one item takes longer than expected. Another issue is that certain courses for group tutoring only meet once a week at a certain hour. These limited times can be inconvenient for most students if they have a conflict or are unable to meet at that time.
I reached out to the center during my freshman year, and I was not very pleased with the tutoring options that were given to me. All of my sessions were held online and not in person due to COVID-19, which made learning even harder. This was difficult because I was unable to get through all the material I wanted to cover. I always left the meetings feeling unsuccessful. Even though tutoring is in person this semester, their resources need to reflect the needs of students.
However, the center does provide another tutoring service to use if a student is wanting extra time. However, it costs money, and the student is usually paired with someone who is not always affiliated with Baylor. This may not be beneficial for students because the tutor may teach the course completely different and will not be familiar with the professor who teaches the course. This leads to students learning about other concepts that may not be relevant to the course, or the tutor may not have the best knowledge of the topic that the student is wanting to discuss.
Students are also allowed to sign up for multiple sessions throughout the day. However, they are not always able to sign up for two 30-minute sessions that are back to back. This is an issue because students may feel even more confused when having to learn the same material from a different tutor. With the limited timed sessions that are currently offered, I believe the Baylor tutoring center should make one-on-one tutoring longer and offer more times for group sessions.
