Academic Integrity and Tutoring

(These guidelines are adapted with permission from the University of Missouri’s 'Tutor's Guide to Academic Integrity' -- http://osrr.missouri.edu/graduates/tutor.html.)

The purpose of tutoring is not to raise students' grades, but to help them learn. The tutor's role is never to do students' assignments for them, but to help students learn the concepts and methods needed to do their assignments themselves.

The following guidelines describe limitations on the kind of help that a tutor can offer. They apply to online tutoring as well as tutoring in person. Failure to stay within these guidelines constitutes a serious violation of academic integrity, and may result in the tutor’s dismissal from his or her program.

Before beginning to work with a student, the tutor should check the syllabus of the course(s) on which help is sought, to see what the instructor says about help on homework assignments, take-home quizzes and exams, etc. When in doubt about course policies, the tutor should check with the course instructor.

On writing assignments, tutors should be non-directive—asking questions about the assignment, not answering them. Tutors can make students aware of the structural and rhetorical requirements of an assignment, but should not fulfill these requirements for them. For example, a tutor may model a thesis statement, but may not draft one for a specific assignment.

Answering questions from homework assignments is the main activity where issues of academic integrity can arise. It is the tutor’s responsibility to determine whether a problem presented by the student is to be turned in for a grade. A tutor may work any problem for a student that is not being turned in for a grade. If a problem is being turned in for a grade, the tutor should not supply a complete (or even partial) solution to that problem. Tutors may create or select similar problems and work through them for the purpose of illustrating the concepts and methods that the student will need in completing the assigned problems. The tutor may look at a student's work on assigned problems for the purpose of identifying the student's errors. The tutor may address misunderstandings of course concepts that might have caused these errors. 

On a take-home quiz or exam, the help that a tutor can provide is limited to the kind of help that they would provide in preparing a student for an in-class quiz or exam. Without clear direction from the instructor to the contrary, the tutor should not look at the quiz problems for the purpose of creating or selecting similar problems and should not inspect a student's solutions to the quiz problems for errors.