IGCSE Tutors in Sector 104 Gurugram: Comparing Your Shortlist Properly

Give them the same piece of work. Take one five or six-mark answer your child wrote, send it to both, and ask each to mark it, name the marks lost and describe what they would change in the first three weeks. The replies separate immediately. One offers encouragement and a plan to revise the topic; the other quotes the scheme and names a specific habit. Confidence on a phone call tells you nothing useful. How someone marks a single answer tells you almost everything.

Not really, though it changes who suits you. Pearson Edexcel codes look like 4MA1, 4PH1 and 4CH1, and the papers are structured differently from Cambridge, so ask a tutor directly which board they have taught at this level rather than assuming the syllabus transfers. Online widens the Edexcel pool considerably, since fewer local tutors along this stretch specialise in it than in Cambridge. Send the codes with your enquiry. Matching on the code rather than the subject name prevents the wrong past papers being used for months.

Ask before the session, not after. Practice varies: some tutors charge the normal rate for a diagnostic session, some charge a reduced one, and very few work free. What matters more is what you get out of it. A diagnostic session should end with a written summary naming what the tutor found and what they propose for the first month. Pay for that willingly. A free session that produces nothing in writing has cost you a week, which is more expensive than the fee.

Online, almost certainly. Additional Mathematics 0606 has a thin tutor pool anywhere in Gurugram and a thinner one along the Dwarka Expressway sectors, so insisting on home visits can cost you a month of searching. An online specialist can usually be arranged faster and often costs less because there is no travel. If you want a person in the room, one realistic pattern is a local tutor for the main Mathematics paper and an online specialist for 0606. Give three to four weeks of notice either way.

Eight to ten weeks before, if you can manage it. Mocks are the last full rehearsal and they generate the predictions that go onto applications, so arriving two weeks out limits a tutor to damage control. With ten weeks there is room to run two or three full papers, build a list of repeated errors, and see whether it shortens. Starting after the mock is not wasted either, because you then have real scripts to work from. Starting a fortnight before and expecting the mock to reflect it does not work.

Usually yes, though the same tutor can often take both if the subject and board line up. What does not work is one session covering both children at once, because Grade 9 and Grade 10 are doing different work and the Grade 10 student ends up waiting. Back-to-back slots on the same visit are the sensible arrangement, and most tutors prefer it because the travel is already done. It also tends to cost less per session than two separate visits on different evenings.

That is the most common gap in Grade 10 and it is rarely about understanding. Recognising a solution when someone explains it is a different skill from producing one alone, in silence, in twenty minutes. Ask him to attempt a past paper with the book closed and a timer running, then have him compare his own answers against the mark scheme. The result is usually uncomfortable and clarifying. A tutor should be watching him work rather than talking at him for the first few sessions.

For Grade 10, one longer session tends to win, because a full paper needs an uninterrupted run and a sixty-minute slot never fits one. Ninety minutes to two hours works well. For Grade 9 the opposite is often true: two shorter sessions keep the habit alive across the week and a fourteen-year-old's attention holds better. The deciding factor is homework. If work between sessions is not happening, more contact time will not rescue it and a different conversation is needed instead.

Then you stop. Nothing needs to be committed for a term on day one, and the sensible checkpoint is four weeks, when there is enough marked work to judge honestly. Ask for the session notes and the marked papers to be handed over before the arrangement ends, because a replacement tutor starting with that folder saves several weeks of re-diagnosis. Requesting a different match is routine and does not require a complaint. Say it plainly and early rather than letting sessions drift on out of politeness.