How to earn part-time while you study - Online tutoring!

I am writing this article because today marks 6 months of my tutoring experience in Chegg Tutors. Now, you will be wondering what's Chegg Tutors right? Chegg Tutors is an online tutoring website that matches students who need help with online tutors. Students can receive help either on-demand or by scheduling a lesson. InstaEDU was founded in 2011 and launched into public beta in May 2012. On June 3, 2014, Chegg announced that it purchased InstaEDU for $30 million in cash and that it plans to keep the InstaEDU service active as Chegg Tutors.

I came across Chegg Tutors in my final year at college. Some of my classmates started using the service to teach students online and they were making quite a lot of money from it. Obviously, this made me interested and I applied to Chegg Tutors. Chegg Tutors pays tutor's 20$ per hour, which I suppose is a fairly very good deal. During peak months, Chegg sometimes raises this amount to 30$ per hour to encourage tutors to take up more questions. In my 6 months in Chegg, this occurred twice in the month of June if my memory is correct. Now from the student side, they pay 45$ per hour and more than 50% of the share goes to Chegg.

Applying to Chegg Tutors

Applying to Chegg Tutors is fairly simple. You can start an application from this link. You would need an active Facebook account for the application. Once you fill in the basic details, you will be asked to write about your prior teaching experience, description about your skills in various topics etc. You will also be able to select up to 40 skills ranging from English, History, Geography to Computer Science at the time of the application. You can later change these skills if your application gets accepted. You will also need to submit two ID proofs. ID proofs can be scanned copy of your University ID, Grade Statement, a screenshot of your University profile etc. Make sure you submit your best application, Chegg doesn't allow you to re-submit if you are rejected once. From what I observed, Chegg takes tutors in the fields where there is an existing shortage of tutors like MIPS, Assembly coding etc (this varies at any point of time but MIPS almost always have a shortage of tutors). Whereas, subjects like Math, Computer Science etc might already have saturated number of tutors active. Based on factors like these and your application profile, Chegg will revert back to you in 3-4 days whether you are accepted or rejected.

How it works

Students can ask a question to initiate a chat with a tutor for determining the deadline and tutoring time, or the student can directly post an open question with a pre-defined deadline and tutoring time. The first, will be the questions seen in the opportunities section of the Chegg tutors and the later is the ones seen in the dashboard section.

1. Live lesson: In the Live lesson, the tutor will teach the students live through the Chegg tutor interface. Very similar to a Remote Desktop Connection. You will be able to see the students screen and vice-versa. It can be a chat conversation, audio, or video call. The sessions start as soon as both the student and the tutor enters the lesson. At the end of the lesson, the tutors will be paid for the lesson time spend in the room. Tutors also have the option to pause the lesson or discard the lesson from billing if the lesson didn't go well for the student.
2. Written lesson: A written lesson can be sent to a specific tutor. Basically, the difference is that it is not live. The written lesson will have the time to spend and a deadline mentioned. Each written lesson can go up to a maximum of 180 minutes. If you think the work will take more time than that, you have to ask the student to send multiple written lessons.
3. Open Written lesson: This is similar to Written lessons, but the question is open to any Chegg Tutor on the same topic. So, whichever tutor who claims the question first will get a chance to help the student. Once the question is claimed, the tutor has to submit the answer withing 2*time allowed for the lesson. For example, if it is a 1-hour lesson, the tutor have to answer it in the next 2 hours once claimed. The tutor also have the option to keep claimed every 2-hour interval until the final deadline expires.

Tutors have to make sure that they provide students with proper lessons. The review system in Chegg allows students to review the tutor on the lessons he has taken. Tutors have to keep a high positive review status for this matter and also if you consistently provide wrong lessons, Chegg has the authority to remove you from Chegg Tutors.

Chegg Tutors Honor Code

It is very important that Students, as well as Tutors, follows these rules while using Chegg Tutors. "The Honor Code is Chegg Tutors's policy on academic integrity. It articulates Chegg Tutors expectations of students and tutors in establishing and maintaining the highest standards in academic work. Chegg Tutors does not condone, and will not participate in, academic dishonesty -- tutors will not take tests nor complete a graded assignment on your behalf. Tutors may not knowingly help a student cheat, plagiarize, or engage in any action that violates the academic honor code of the class or the school. Good tutoring is more than simply giving out answers to questions. We encourage teaching, helping students understand concepts and developing effective problem-solving approaches."

1. To Students: The Chegg Tutors team understands the pressures and time constraints school creates. However, the risk you take by violating your school's code of academic integrity is not worth the reward. Copying solutions or requesting unexplained final answers promotes completion without comprehension, which is something we don't support on this site.
2. To Tutors: At Chegg Tutors, we give you great responsibility in handling yourself with students using our service. As current and former students yourselves, we trust that you understand the principles of academic integrity, but would like to remind you that you're required to uphold the following practices:

• Strictly adhere to the above Chegg Tutors Honor Code in all tutoring interactions.
• Convey that tutoring is not a replacement for students attending class or doing their homework. The tutor's role is to help students understand concepts and develop effective problem-solving approaches. Any evidence that you have knowingly facilitated cheating will be cause for your immediate removal from the site.

How you get payed?

For payment process, you need an active PayPal account. For those who don't have one yet, it is fairly easy to create one. You just need to create a new account at PayPal and link your bank account to it. For people in India, make sure your PAN card number is attached to the bank account. Also, make sure the profile name you enter in PayPal is same as your name in PAN card. With this, your PayPal account will be ready in 2-3 days. Chegg sends tutor earnings on a weekly basis. The payment comes to your PayPal id on every Thursday for the tutoring work you did in the previous week. If you withdraw the money from PayPal to your bank account on the same day itself, by Monday or Tuesday the money will be transferred to your bank account.

My 6 Month Chegg Tutor Stats

• Number of students taught: 72
• Total Earnings: 3177.67$ ~ INR 2,17,973
• Distinct days I worked: ~60 days (46 distinct submission days)
• Total Tutoring Time: 9008 minutes ~150 hours
• Average earning per student: 44$ ~ INR 3,000
• Average Tutoring time per student: 125 minutes

Stats till December 31st Chegg Tutor [Updated]

• Number of students taught: 105
• Total Earnings: 4502.67$ ~ INR 3,06,537
• Distinct days I worked: ~75 days (62 distinct submission days)
• Total Tutoring Time: 12008 minutes ~200 hours
• Average earning per student: 43$ ~ INR 3,000
• Average Tutoring time per student: 115 minutes

I have introduced Chegg Tutors to most of the people I know. I don't work at Chegg in case if you are wondering if that's the reason for this article. But, I believe this is a great opportunity for students to improve their skills and help other students to learn as well as to earn while studying. There are other websites such as Coursehero.com etc which also promotes online tutoring, but I find Chegg Tutors to be the most productive for tutors. Some of the takeaways that I got from this experience is that:

• You learn more perseverance while teaching students. Sometimes you will have to spend hours explaining the topic to the students. Most of the times, it's fairly easy, though.
• I have often wondered why I am learning specific topics while I was in my high school and in college, which seemed as if it had no practical applications in my life. Here, even teaching simple chemistry topics helps you to earn more.
• You keep revising and refreshing what you have learned when you teach. Chegg has certainly helped me to improve my programming skills and Computer Science knowledge.