Last week, our tuition agency has reached the count of 11000 home tutor sign-ups, excluding those who are being blacklisted or placed in our holding list. They have all signed up with us through our website and we are proud of it.

We thank all the tuition tutors who have trusted us.

We do want to remind all tutors to read through our website carefully before signing up with us. We take the effort to go through each tutor profile manually with the help of our tuition system and thus every tutor should spend some effort filling up details during registration as well.

Before signing up as a tutor, every tutor should have read about our document verification procedure. We urge all tutors to read through the home tutor verification page before submitting any document to us in order to speed up process. We may not be able to contact every tutor when there is any rejected document.

Once again, thank you, dear tutors!

Hello all!

Please note that since around yesterday, many Yahoo emails are randomly sending spam emails around. These Yahoo emails are believed to be hacked. The automatically generated emails contain no subject and the content is simply a weird URL with Germany (.de) and normal dot com (.com) domains.

Please do not click on any of the URL even though the email is sent via your friend’s email address.

So far, all the emails are from Yahoo emails and it is known that hackers have been attacking Yahoo emails all over the world recently. However, we are not sure if non-Yahoo email users would be affected after clicking on the URLs.

If you have received such email as described, please inform the “sender” immediately before more internet users suffer from the hacking attempts.

Affected Yahoo email account owners should change their passwords immediately and notify all the contacts in their contact list or address book about such attack. We are not sure if the sent emails are being stored in the “sent folder” or similar places.

In fact, similar email scams have been circulating around since last year. As we have over 10000 tutors in our database, we are hit by the email spam from affected tutors. We have since last night notified some affected tutors. We will do another round of notification work at the end of the day. Hope our effort can help everyone.

For scam alert, you may visit website like Scams Singapore.

Hi parents, students and tutors,

We have just made a minor but significant update to our home tutor list. We used to display all registered, approved and available tutors who have enabled “public listing” inside our tutor list, including tutors who have received lower rating from us. Now, we are only keeping the tutors with certain amount of rating in the list but they will still have their individual public profile available.

Our tuition agency does not hesitate to reduce rating of tutors who have created problems during tuition, failed to update their profiles properly and accurately, failed to submit their document properly, shown that they are totally money-driven, failed badly in understanding simple instructions etc. On the other hand, tuition tutors who have shown effort and good attitude will be rewarded instead. This helps to differentiate the tutors, which makes it fairer for the better tutors.

Needless to say, tutors who have given major problems will be blacklisted immediately.

The purpose of removing tuition tutors with lower rating from the home tutor list is to ensure that parents/students will not be disappointed after selecting them. Whereas, tutors with lower rating are still given chances to build up their reputation and credibility.

Smart Tuition reserves the right to advise our clients against using any unsuitable tutor.

Today is the day for 2012 GCE ‘O’ level candidates.

Our tuition agency would like to wish all candidates good luck!

Remember that this is not the end of the route. Keep pursuing knowledge!

For other result release dates, do check out our website.

Smart Tuition has reached the number of 10,000 approved home tutors in our tuition agency on 6 January 2013. The figure does not include tutors who are being blacklisted or kept in our “holding” list.

We are not looking at quantity, but rather, quality. Hence, since day one of our operation, we have been trying hard to identify good tutors. Our ideal tutors are those who are able to deliver their knowledge and also have good character because we believe both will affect the students. Therefore, we do not hesitate to blacklist black sheep who are arrogant or irresponsible, including tutors who focus too much on tuition fee.

There are a small number of tutors who would exit from tutoring services soon after registering with us as well. These tutors are wasting our time because every tutor takes up quite an amount of time on our administration side. We are, however, happy to remove them from our database because we do know wish them to disrupt the students’ studies halfway. We are trying to get tutors who can help the students till the end of the year. Therefore, we urge tutors to register as a tutor only if they are really passionate.

Our tuition agency does not send spam SMS. In fact, we have also paused most of our web marketing for almost the entire of year 2012 because we do not have the capacity to handle too many tutors on our administration side due to document verification is a major and yet non-profiting component. We appreciate tutors who trust us and sign up on their own accord through various ways, especially word of mouth.

We would like to thank all the tutors who have already submitted their documents for verification, especially those who have bothered to read up on our home tutor verification page and follow the exact instruction. Every little effort by the tutors can helped us a lot because we are handling tens over documents everyday.

Till this day, we never give empty promises to tutors such as guaranteeing a tuition assignment for them because it depends a lot on luck and their effort. What we have been doing is to increase the chances of good tutors through our system.

Let us do our part for the education of Singapore.

Hi everyone,

We hope you have enjoyed the long year-end holidays and adapted to the beginning of year 2013. Let’s progress together for this whole new fantastic year.

Our tuition agency has done up some tools like previous years to help you to improve on your time management. In fact, we have created them quite some time ago. Everything is for free with no hidden agenda.

First, it’s our 2013 Singapore Calendar that is designed on a single page, which you can print out on A4 size paper. Stick one onto your noticeboard and slip one into your folder to keep track of date.

Next is our popular Singapore calendar planner 2013. Simply print each month on one A4 sized paper. We have spent time to align the columns neatly to utilize the space. We can guarantee that the calendar planner will certainly improve your life.

If you think this two calendar tools are useful, kindly share with your friends!

We have just updated the register as a tutor and tutor edit profile pages. The new layout should be more eyes pleasing to everyone. We are also able to include some short description for each section, hoping to avert issues of small portion of home tutors selecting wrong options.

All the information inside the “Education Records” are history of the tutors and not their preferences. For examples, “Graduated from NIE” is for tutors who have graduated from “National Institute of Education Singapore” and “Attending/attended IP” is for tutors who are still schooling or have graduated from Integrated Programme. Some tutors do not seem to understand what are these two terms and blindly selecting “Yes”.

For tutors who wish to teach student from IP courses, they can select the option “Teach IP?” under “Preferences”.

As part of the improvement, we have also changed all radio buttons to drop-down boxes for all the options to keep the form neater. We want to reduce the amount of texts to reduce the chance of tutors missing out some details. Default option for certain options are changed to “- Select One -” instead of the more commonly used ones. For example, the nationality’s default option is always “Singaporean” because most tutors are Singaporeans and it will reduce one click-job for them during registration. However, there are some tutors who would leave some options as default ones, including the gender (default used to be “female”).

Our tuition agency is always trying to “catch” these “blur” tutors to differentiate them from the more detailed tutors but eventually it has become too taxing/annoying for the administrator. There are too many other less tedious ways for us to judge the tutors than spotting such mistakes. We are always improving to meet our comfort zone while able to differentiate the good and bad tutors.

For the same forms, we have also changed “First Tutoring Year” to “Tutoring Experience”. A tutor had feedback some months ago that some tutors may have stopped tutoring in between and thus it’s more accurate to store the number of years they have tutored instead.

If you have spotted any bug, kindly let us know!

Our tuition agency has reached the count of 9000 registered home tutors about a week ago. This number only includes those whose accounts are being approved. This is yet another milestone for the agency.

Over time, we have been removing handful of black sheep from our tutor list while a handful of tutors have also chosen to stop giving tuition.

We do not hesitate to blacklist tutors who have problems with their integrity or professionalism as these private tutors would only cause problems to both the students and our tuition agency. Whereas for those more fickle-mind tutors, we are pleased to exclude them from our team in case they give up the tuition assignments halfway through.

Our administration side is still tight with our schedule. This is a sign after all. There are always things to work on, such as improving our system and instruction. We have to prioritize our tasks and therefore, some less frequently used features may not be implemented any time soon. An example would be the feature for tutors to remove their uploaded photos – this feature has only been developed a couple of months ago.

There are many more improvements to be made. We may not be able to update the changes promptly over here. Please bear with us while we will always do our best to help everyone.

Our coordinator, Eng Teck, has emerged in the top five of Sunsilk Academy Fantasia competition. On his behalf, we would like to thank all parents and tutors who have helped to vote for him. Every vote counted and he really appreciated it.

Even though he cannot get into the final round, he is pleased because since day one, he already knows about the voting system and he is not from a well-to-do family to sustain long. Every day of stay in the academy is a bonus to him as he has finally received professional training and allowed more audience to see his talent. He has garnered more support than any other contestant though, with REAL fans approaching him.

He is currently busy holding “thank you” gatherings, rehearing for Sunsilk Academy Fantasia final performance and taking care of his tutees. We would expect him to return to join our force once his stuffs are settled down.

We hope he would be able to realise his dream within this two years.

Hi everyone! Thanks for visiting our tuition agency blog. Sorry for the lack of updates here for the past few weeks due to tight schedule.

We have a piece of good news, which is our tuition assignments daily updates subscribers has hit 1,200 a few weeks ago. Thanks for the interest in our tuition assignments! However, to be frank and honest, not every tutor is able to get a tuition assignment from us in near future because of the tight competition. It depends a lot of the tutor’s profile and luck. The same situation definitely occurs in all tuition agencies. We have mentioned this a few times and do not wish tutors to get disappointed after weeks.

We have been battling against time for the past few weeks partly due to the fact that our tuition coordinator, ET, is involved in the Sunsilk Academy Fantasia singing competition. He is currently among the top seven contestants to compete for the two-year singing contract with Ocean Butterfly company. Some of us have been spending our time maintaining his website and Facebook fan page. We go down to the competition venue to support him every week and also spend hours to process the photos taken.

The reason we are taking our time and effort to help ET is because he is our team-mate and has been doing extremely good jobs. Apart from these and his good character, he is one of the most talented singers among the contestants as recognised by the judges. However, 70% of the competition’s voting power goes to public SMS voting, which costs $0.70 each and thus, we are not very optimistic over it. We sincerely thank all the clients and tutors who have spent the effort to vote for him after hearing from us about him fighting hard for his dream. We are very proud of his performance for the past five weeks.

This is a challenging period for our administration side. We are very thankful to all registered home tutors who have submitted their documents properly for verification because it really helps to reduce time wastage. It clearly shows that either you do bother to read and follow instruction or you have very high EQ to understand the minimal standard for the documents.

There may be some limitation to what we can do and we really hope everyone will understand our hardship and appreciate our effort.

Meanwhile, there are quite a number of other updates and we will be penning down details in this blog. Please check back again!