A Final Report By Molly McGouran

Introduction

Why do we behave with integrity?  This was the first question I was asked when I logged onto “Ethics in Tutoring,” the first of my Zoom sessions in the Tutor Training Program.  As I sat at my laptop, confronted with this question, I was opened up to the world of student professionalization at UofT.  After an hour of the Student Life staff member leading me and the one other student in the session through mock scenarios of how to help students without breaking the academic code of conduct and writing exercises on why we felt it was important to act with integrity, I was left with a multitude of thoughts and questions about the aims of this session, and the program as a whole.

Student Life is one of the largest departments of its kind in North America, and yet, as I scrolled through the website looking for something that stood out to me, I was met with a wall of programs I had never known about.  Amidst the pages of information, linking from department to department, I found the University of Toronto Tutor Training Program (UT3). The training program was created by the Centre for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS), a subdivision within Student Life, and planned to train willing students into “institutionally certified tutors.” These tutors are then added to the Tutor Directory, where they can list classes they are able to tutor, along with their availability and rates. Having been put into contact with the director of the CLSS and given the go-ahead to start attending UT3 training sessions, the puzzle of the UT3 program emerged, primarily, how did this program come to be?  While this is a relatively broad question, it led me to probe further into the place that the UT3 program holds in an institution as large as UofT.  Primarily, what were the motivations for creating this program, and what existing tensions does the existence of the UT3 program reveal about UofT? 

With the size of Student Life at UofT, I believe it is helpful to look at how an individual program can help to gain insight into the department and university as a whole. The immediate answer that I was given throughout my fieldwork was that the UT3 program exists to fulfill unmet student needs for more academic aid resources, but throughout my research, a more ethically ambiguous motivation arose. The prestige of attending UofT is accompanied by a high tuition fee, especially for international students, and a promise of top-notch education.  The existence of private tutoring services has led to a panic within the administration about students paying to have work completed for them.  This is where the puzzle of how the UT3 program came to be becomes important.  The creation of a tutor marketplace is a means for UofT administration to continue to collect tuition, expand academic aid services, and protect its integrity as a research university all in one.  But this solution does not come without creating ethical tensions.  This paper examines the UT3 program as a case study to understand how Student Life programs reflect the broader priorities of the university, specifically through the creation of and ethical tensions surrounding student-to-student market relations.  

Methodology

The context of this ethnography lies in the contacts I was given of the staff working at the CLSS.  Many of my findings were gathered through the access I had to CLSS administrators, including attendance at administrative meetings and an interview with the creator of the UT3 program.  I conducted additional fieldwork and gained insight into the curriculum of the program by attending UT3 sessions as a student.  Additionally, some preliminary and supplementary research was done through the Student Life website and the documents available there, as well as looking into private tutoring websites.  All of my research was conducted online. For the duration of my research, the CLSS office was under renovation, and the temporary office (off-campus) is rarely used. Therefore, administrative meetings and my interviews were conducted over Microsoft Teams, and all UT3 sessions were conducted either asynchronously through Folio or Quercus, or synchronously over Zoom.  

The Tutoring Universe at UofT: Identifying Unmet Needs

To understand the UT3 program, it is necessary to provide an overview of the existing resources that were categorized as not meeting the needs of students that the UT3 program seeks to address.  Through speaking with the creator of the UT3 program, “Amanda”, it was apparent that there were two main camps that these resources fall into: resources offered through UofT that are included in the cost of tuition and paid tutoring services run by companies outside of the university.  Research into both sides suggests two different versions of the purpose of the UT3 program: (1) the program was made to alleviate stress on the overstretched existing academic resources available to students and provide more help to students who need it, and (2) the program was made to maintain the academic integrity of the university, and draw business away from the private tutoring services that allow students to cheat on marked work, therefore sullying the integrity of grades earned at UofT.  

Academic support at UofT can be broken down further into two categories: content and non-content-specific.  The content-specific academic resources consist of subject-specific aid and tutoring centres, writing instructors available through writing centres offered through the colleges, and peer mentor appointments offered through Student Life, where students have the option to book an appointment with a mentor in their field of study to ask content-specific questions. The non-content-specific aid consists of learning strategists within the CLSS and each college who offer support for study strategies and planning.  In my interview with Amanda, she expressed how, for students in the sciences in particular, there are so many programs being advertised outside the university that students often end up spending a fortune on because they cannot get the help they need through the existing resources alone.  In exploring the academic resources available, it is apparent that there is certainly a lack of such services at UofT.  The CLSS website details all existing academic aid services, and in reviewing them, I found that there was a substantial lack for a campus of over 60 000 students.

The aid and tutoring centres are run by subject, and only supply tutoring for specific courses within those subjects.  Out of over 700 undergraduate programs, aid and tutoring centres cover eight programs (chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, math, philosophy, physics, and statistics) (uoft.me/SubjectSupport).  These services run at various times; however, many are led in groups, offer aid only for specific first-year courses, and vary in the number of hours that are offered, anywhere from four hours (math learning centre) to thirty hours (economics aid centre).  Additionally, some tutoring services offered to engineering and math students are available at an extra charge.  Writing centres are another option, run through each college, and offer hour-long appointments Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm.  At writing centres, students can meet with experienced instructors to improve their written assignments and writing skills.  Finally, the CLSS offers peer mentor appointments that students can book through folio.  These appointments are run on the schedule of the peer mentors but typically run between 9 am and 5 pm and last 30-45 minutes.  These mentorship appointments also lean more towards learning strategies than content-specific assistance, but the programs of the mentors are listed if a student has a content-specific question that a specific mentor could help with.  Through this brief overview of the existing offerings at UofT, it is apparent that this amount of assistance is insufficient for a campus of this size.  This gap in aid paints half of the picture of what spurred Amanda to create the UT3 program.  The other half is illuminated through the second camp that I mentioned, paid private tutoring services.

In our interview, Amanda told me about her experience with services such as these saying,

“When I was in first year (at UofT), I was a life science student, and I paid so much money that I did not have for MAT135 prep, CHEM136 prep, all the prep courses that they advertised because the packages that they give, or least that they did at the time, looked awesome. So, I spent a fortune that I didn’t have on it, and they didn’t help at all.  Moving forward throughout my career at UofT, I worked with faculty members who really didn’t like the fact that these kinds of programs, or businesses, existed.”

The inception of the UT3 program was built on the knowledge of the existence of these private tutoring services and the framing of them as being predatory towards students looking for help.  Amanda also discussed how, in the time since she was a student, these services have only grown.  In a Google search, I was able to find a few of these services (studypool.com, superprof.ca, and yourpersonalprofessor.org).  These services advertise themselves as reputable; however, they also advertise services like submitting a question and receiving a quick and in-depth answer, effectively providing students with a way to pay for answers to their assignments. Evidently, as Amanda discussed, private tutoring services have grown to be a large concern for the university, creating an academic integrity issue wherein students could be obtaining fraudulent grades by paying for these services.  The question, then, is how the university addresses these issues. The UT3 program may potentially be a solution to both. If students are trained to be tutors, some pressure can be alleviated from the existing resources. By having another place to send students to get help rather than turning to private services, the university can cut down on the threat of academic misconduct, especially if students are already willing to pay.  Understanding the tutoring universe provides the first answer to the puzzle of why the program was created, but the issue of ethics and integrity is a further source deserving of inquiry.

Navigating Ethical Considerations: UT3 and Market Relations

While working through the UT3 training sessions, I found that the professionalized student is a reproduction of the value of academic integrity that UofT holds as a globally recognized research institution.  Through my interview with Amanda, I found that there was more to be learned about how this reproduction also creates certain ethical complications.  After I requested an interview, she sent an immediate response, and a few days later, I was greeted with an upbeat hello and smile upon logging onto the Microsoft teams link she had sent me.  I could feel her excitement about the program, especially as she told me about her own experiences being a UofT student.  The program took five years to come to fruition, and after her own experience as a student, she first began working on it after she met a representative of a platform designed for universities developing tutoring programs.  This company, Nimbus, would eventually be the platform on which the UT3 Tutor Directory is housed.  At first, not wanting to develop the program because “the CLSS does not touch content,” Amanda tried to help the representative break into other areas of the university.  Describing UofT as a “tough nut to crack,” a massive institution with so many moving parts that make developing a new program difficult, and despite not having the budget or time to head it herself, she still saw value in the program. After the COVID-19 pandemic, however, she found herself contemplating how she could actually make it work.

My interview with Amanda provided more insight into how the curriculum of the UT3 program was shaped by the ethical tensions its creation brings up.  What struck me first was the amount of time it took to get the program up and running.  Started in 2019, Amanda had to go through a “road show,” as she called it, an exhaustive list of meetings with departments throughout the university.  All of the departments of the existing academic aid services, the legal department, academic integrity, student organizations, and professors were consulted throughout the process in order to maintain the integrity of the program.  A sticking point of the program was that the CLSS absolutely did not want to handle money.  Tutors were not their employees.  This entailed, as she described, numerous meetings with the UofT legal department to ensure that the wording of the program was clear: this is not a work-study, and the CLSS and UofT are not responsible for “something going wrong.”  This is where it becomes abundantly clear that this is a market relation between students alone. The program crafts the professionalized student in their image and thrusts them off to offer their tutoring services.  Tutors can be rated, they can be taken off the directory, but UofT maintains no legal standing in financial exchanges between students.  I found this to be interesting because of what it illuminates about the ethical question of what it means to create market relations between students.  This ethical consideration can again be seen in the tutor training sessions.  

Shaping the Professionalized Student: Ethics and Integrity in UT3 Training

With an understanding of the existing universe of academic aid within and outside of UofT, it is apparent that there is merit to the development of a program like UT3.  That being said, through attending several UT3 training sessions, I observed a pattern developing in what was being taught to soon-to-be certified tutors.  My findings are drawn from two sessions, “Ethics in Tutoring” and “Assignment and Syllabus Analysis.” As discussed in my introduction, Ethics in tutoring was a synchronous session conducted over Zoom, with Amanda, myself, and one other student. The main discussion focused on how to avoid academic misconduct when tutoring, primarily through making sure that anything brought to a tutor by a student they are tutoring is not marked work.  The Assignment and Syllabus Analysis session was conducted asynchronously through Quercus and focused on teaching tutors how to read assignment and syllabus instructions, again, to avoid helping students with any work that would be turned in for a grade.  These sessions bring the aims of the UT3 program into a new light.  With such a heavy focus on ethics and academic integrity, they exemplify how crafting tutors in the image of UofT is a means of reproducing the university’s integrity.  

The follow-up to the opening question of the Ethics in Tutoring session was, “What does integrity mean to you?”  After sharing our answers, we were informed on what integrity means to the university. Amanda told us that “integrity at UofT means that the grade you earn means something.”  That something being the value of attending a prestigious research institution. We were then asked to think about academic misconduct, “does academic misconduct clash with your sense of integrity?”  This interaction informed the way I look at the crafting of the professionalized student.  Academic misconduct covers many actions that were also outlined in the session: plagiarism, resubmitting your own work, impersonation, and using unauthorized aids.  The student professional is trained from one of the first sessions to be aware of all the ways they could harm their reputation and the university’s.  

There were several sections of the sessions that stuck out as tenets of the ideal “institutionally certified tutor.”  UT3 aims to professionalize the student tutor, to train them into being what the university needs.  That is a well-prepared, vigilant, honest, and ethical individual who will represent the values that the university wants to portray.  Well-prepared in that they will be knowledgeable on the subjects they are tutoring, all UT3 tutors must have taken and obtained at least a 70% in any course they wish to tutor.  Vigilant, in that they will be ready to look out for a student bringing them marked work.  And honest and ethical so that they will not assist any students with marked work, whether that be through completion or even editing.  The professionalized student tutor, then, is a means of reproducing the identity of the university.  As a well-respected research institution, UofT is tasked with keeping a certain reputation.  Keeping the students of the university in line is an important aspect of maintaining this reputation.  

The Assignment and Syllabus Analysis session also brought up another conflict.  Several slides in the module encourage tutors to send their students back to the existing academic aid resources if they need additional help.  One slide includes the heading “Did you know?” and directs tutors to look into the peer mentorship appointments offered by the CLSS.  The final section is entitled “Additional Resources” and directs tutors to the page on the CLSS website that I used to find all of the existing academic resources.  Having the lesson direct tutors to other offerings for academic support at UofT brings up the question of whether UT3 is contributing to the problem of unmet needs or if it is just a response to the privatized tutoring sphere.  It creates another conflict because if the unmet need is a lack of resources, how does training students to become “institutionally approved” tutors who will send the students paying them back to the already provided services help the student that is paying for assistance? Both modules seem to be trying to address how to create a helpful tutor without stepping into the bounds of academic misconduct; however, the ethical tensions that exist within creating this commoditized student-to-student relationship are only made clearer when so much of the training has to do with directing students to the programming that their tuition is already paying for.  It is a difficult path to tread and one that it seems all of my research circles back to.

The Tutoring Loop: Unmet Needs, Market Relations, and the UT3 Paradox

Throughout my research, I happened upon many details that seem to pull the UT3 program in different directions.  In the spirit of ethnographic inquiry and attempting to solve the puzzles that emerged, I found that the problems and answers of my research continued around each other in a cyclical nature. I have theorized this into a loop that attempts to embody the world of tutoring and academic aid at UofT and explain the sticky situation that has emerged. The loop begins with the unmet needs of students.  As I explained in my overview of academic aid services at UofT, there is a clear deficit of help in comparison to the number of students and programs offered at the university.  There are not enough subject-specific offerings, and the hours offered are too narrow for the demanding lives of UofT students. This problem has led to students seeking outside assistance from private tutoring services, which do not uphold the academic integrity standards of the university. This led to the creation of the UT3 program. The CLSS developed a system to train trusted tutors in order to alleviate stress on the existing academic resources.  However, in doing so, they created a market relationship between students. This market relationship is solidified through the CLSS’s need to remove themselves from financial transactions in order to remove liability from the university. The newest academic resource then limits the relationship that is created between tutors and other students. Tutors are told that they cannot do everything, if they offer their services at too high of a price and students can only afford one hour, or if the student is too far behind, the tutor may not offer enough hours to help them.  Therefore, the tutor must redirect the student back to the existing academic resources, thereby looping back to the beginning of the cycle. In a market relationship, these issues become increasingly difficult to reconcile.  

Conclusion: The Future of Academic Support at UofT

It is difficult to feel as though there is an answer to the loop.  The size and structure of UofT constrain what changes can be made and on what timeline. As Amanda said, UofT is a tough nut to crack, and change is slow when layers of bureaucracy stand between ideas and meaningful change. While Student Life attempts to be a pastoral entity within a massive institution, they are still confined by budgetary restraints.  The easy answer would be to expand the existing academic aid services and provide more subject-specific support. If the existing resources were not overextended, there would be no need to create a market relationship between students.  But there is not an easy answer when the limitations are as stringent as they are at UofT.  As an entity within the university, the constraints on Student Life as they try to help students produced the UT3 program in its current form.  

What can be extrapolated from my research are two main implications that could arise from the creation of the UT3 program.  First, I fear that the professionalization of students could lend itself to further stratification between students.  Creating the marketplace could allow only those students who are in financial circumstances where they can pay for extra help to gain an advantage over those who cannot.  Second, as UofT is conducted as a business, it offers a way to explain away the need for additional free services.  In my interview with Amanda, she told me that there were already forty working tutors on the directory and over 400 currently working through the modules.  While the success of the program could be beneficial for students, from a financial perspective, it could offer an alternative to UofT administration having to allocate funds towards expanding the existing academic aid services.  This is not to say that this is what will happen but to open up the possibilities of what could develop.  I believe what truly needs to happen is increased funding to the existing resources so that students do not have to pay for support on top of their already increasing tuition.  However, for the time being, it seems that the UT3 program and the market relationship it creates is the most effective answer to how Student Life can help students.