What the tutor diagnostic actually tests

Most tutoring marketplaces verify that a person is who they say they are, and stop. That is a check on identity, not on teaching, and it is the reason a profile on most platforms tells you almost nothing.

We do the identity check too. But before a profile goes live, a tutor also sits a written paper in the subject and level they want to teach.

It is a real paper

Not a quiz, and not a personality questionnaire. The diagnostic is built from the same question types a Diploma student faces — multiple choice, short answer, and extended response — against the actual subject guide for that level.

A Physics HL applicant answers Physics HL questions. Someone who wants to teach both HL and SL sits the HL paper, because HL contains SL.

It is marked the way the IB marks

The paper is marked against assessment objectives, not as a percentage:

• AO1 — knowledge and understanding
• AO2 — application and analysis
• AO3 — synthesis and evaluation
• AO4 — use of technique

This matters more than it sounds. A tutor can be excellent at AO1 and weak at AO3, and those are different people to hire depending on what your child needs. A single number would hide exactly the thing you want to know.

It is also the same shape of report a student gets once lessons start, which is deliberate. If we are going to report on a student per objective, we should be willing to be reported on the same way.

Publishing is the tutor's choice

Here is the part that surprises people: a tutor does not have to publish the result.

If they publish, the band appears on their profile. If they do not, the profile is shown without it — not with a low score, not with a "not verified" warning, and not pushed down the search results.

That is a deliberate design decision and we hold it firmly. A marketplace that punishes people for not opting into a public score has not made the score optional; it has made it compulsory and called it a choice. A tutor with fifteen years in an IB classroom who would rather not sit a written paper on a Tuesday evening is not a worse tutor, and our page should not imply that they are.

What it is not

The diagnostic does not measure whether someone can teach. Nothing written can. It measures whether they know the subject at the level they are claiming — which is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

That is what the free first session is for. The diagnostic tells you the subject knowledge is there. The session tells you whether your child wants to come back.