Guides

Twelve questions to ask before you hire a tutor

By BengalTutors Team · 31 Aug 2026

Most guardians hire a tutor after one phone call in which they ask the fee, the university, and whether the tutor is free on Sunday. Then they find out over the following three months whether it was a good decision.

These are the twelve questions that move that discovery forward by about eleven weeks. They take ten minutes, and you can ask them of anybody — somebody a neighbour recommended, somebody from a Facebook group, or somebody who applied to a tuition you posted here.

About who they are

1. Which institution, which department, which year?
Specific. Write it down. "A university in Dhaka" is not an answer.

2. May I see your student ID when you come?
Ask on the phone so it is not a surprise at the door. Anyone genuine says yes without any change in tone.

3. What did you score in the subject you will be teaching?
Not the overall result — the subject. Somebody excellent overall and mediocre in Chemistry is not your Chemistry tutor.

About the teaching

4. Which board, and have you prepared a student for it?
Boards differ in how they ask questions and how they mark. A tutor who has prepared students for your child's board knows what the paper looks like now. One who has not is teaching the subject rather than the exam, which is a different and less useful purchase at SSC and HSC.

5. How will you find out where my child actually is?
The right answer involves finding out what they cannot do from an earlier year, not starting at the current chapter. Almost every struggling student in this country is struggling because of something two years back.

6. What will you set between classes, and will you mark it?
This is the sharpest question on the list. A tutor working only in the room has three hours a week. A tutor who sets and marks small work has the whole week, at a cost to them of twenty minutes.

7. How will you tell me how it is going?
Three sentences a week is enough. Somebody who will not do that is somebody you cannot supervise.

About whether it will survive

8. Where exactly do you live, and how will you get here?
Ask about the journey at the actual class time — 6pm on a Tuesday, not Friday morning. Travel time is the single largest cause of tuitions ending, and it ends them in month four, not month one.

9. How many other tuitions do you have, and where are they?
You are finding out whether you are their main arrangement or the outlying one they will drop. This is not rude; every experienced tutor expects it.

10. When are your own exams, and what happens to our classes then?
Nearly every tutor in Bangladesh is also a student. Their exams will collide with your child's. A precise answer means they have thought about it. "It will be fine" means they have not.

About the money

11. What is the monthly figure, and does anything else get added later?
One number. Confirm that travel, exam months and extra sessions are inside it or explicitly outside it. Fee drift ruins more arrangements than bad teaching does.

12. Is anything payable before the tuition starts — by me or by you?
You should pay no large advance. And a tutor should never have paid anybody for the privilege of being given your phone number. That arrangement is the oldest fraud in this market, and a tutor who has been through it will be starting the job already out of pocket.

For the record, on this site nothing is payable to register, browse or apply, and our own placement fee is charged once, in the first month, shared between family and tutor — after which we charge nothing and you pay the tutor directly. The figures.

The two answers that should end the conversation

Vagueness about identity. Somebody who will not name their department and year, or who becomes uncomfortable at the mention of an ID, has told you enough.

A request for money before anything exists. From either direction.

Everything else is negotiable, including a tutor who has never taught before — plenty of excellent tutors are teaching their first student, and the honest ones say so. What you are testing for is not experience. It is whether the answers are specific.

After you hire

The first month is where you find out whether it is working, and there are four things to watch in a particular order. We have written that out separately: what to watch in the first month.

Start here

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