IB Diploma Private Tutors for the Core: TOK, EE and CAS

No, and a tutor who offers to is telling you something important about themselves. The Extended Essay must be the student's own work. A tutor may teach how to narrow a research question, how to judge whether a source is usable, how to reference consistently, and how an argument holds together over 4,000 words. They may read a draft and ask questions about it. They may not write a sentence of it, restructure it or edit it. Your school submits the essay and runs it through similarity checking.

The supervisor is a teacher at your child's own school, and that cannot be outsourced. Reflection sessions are held with that supervisor and recorded along the way, which forms part of the assessment record rather than an administrative formality. A private tutor works alongside that relationship and never in place of it. If the tutor's advice and the supervisor's instructions differ, the supervisor's instruction is the one the student follows, every time. The school knows which version of the guide applies and is accountable for what is submitted.

Often yes, because the real risk is the failing condition rather than the points. TOK and the Extended Essay are each graded A to E and combine for up to 3 points towards a maximum of 45. An E in either is a failing condition on its own, so a student sitting on a comfortable subject total can still miss the diploma. Judge it on where your child currently stands. If the TOK essay draft is coming back workable, spend that evening on the six subjects instead.

Usually yes, subject to tutor availability and your exact locality. Weekday evening slots across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region are the most requested and the first to go, so a family in Bandra, Juhu, Andheri or Powai should ask early in DP1 rather than partway through DP2. Distance decides reliability more than anything else does. A tutor living inside the same cluster of suburbs will hold an evening slot far better through the monsoon than one crossing from Thane or Navi Mumbai twice a week.

Reading, questioning and planning, in that order. The tutor reads what exists, asks the student to explain the research question out loud without notes, and finds the point where the argument stops being the student's own. Then the two of them plan the next fortnight against the school's deadline sheet. A good home session usually ends with the student holding a short list of things to read and one section to write, and with the tutor holding nothing at all.

It depends on the element, the level and your city, and no honest answer is a single figure. One-to-one core tuition at home costs more per hour than an online session, because travel time is being paid for as well as teaching. TOK and the Extended Essay usually cost more than a routine subject hour, because far fewer tutors teach them at all. A small online group class shares the cost. Ask for the rate in writing before the demo session, and ask what a missed session costs.

Not directly. CAS carries no grade and no points, and it must still be completed for the diploma to be awarded, which means the student has to do it herself. A tutor can help in one narrow way: by sitting down with the school's portal, working out which strands are genuinely outstanding, and building those into a week that already holds six subjects and an Extended Essay. Creativity, Activity and Service are her own commitments, and the reflections must be hers.

Online, and for TOK that is not a second-best choice. Across northern India beyond Delhi NCR, in Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula, Jaipur, Lucknow, Dehradun, Amritsar, Ludhiana and Kanpur, a local TOK specialist is often unavailable at any price. The TOK essay is argument on a page, which transfers to a screen better than almost any other DP work. Keep the Extended Essay with a local tutor if you have one, run TOK online, and treat that hybrid week as the normal arrangement.

The supervisor wins, without discussion. The school holds the current guide, sets the internal deadlines, records the reflection sessions and submits the work. A tutor sits outside all of that and is working from whatever you have shown them. The EE guide was updated for first assessment in 2027, so a tutor quoting criterion mark allocations from memory may be quoting a version that no longer applies to your child. Ask your DP coordinator which guide is in force and make the tutor work from it.

For a DP student, no. Be in the house, not in the room. The core depends on a seventeen-year-old admitting what they do not understand about their own argument, and that conversation changes the moment a parent is listening to it. Keep sessions in a shared part of the house rather than a bedroom, which settles the safeguarding question without sitting in. Ask the tutor for three lines afterwards: what was covered, what the student will do next, and what is worrying them.

The EE deadline is fixed and the mocks are not, so plan around the deadline first. Schools in India set internal deadlines ahead of the IB's precisely to leave room to check and submit, which makes the school's date the real one. Tell the tutor about the clash at the start of term and not in the week itself. In practice that fortnight usually holds if the essay was drafted over the summer between DP1 and DP2, and it rarely holds if it was not.

DP1, if the choice is yours. The Extended Essay is roughly 40 hours of work spread over a two-year timeline, and almost every family who books core help in DP2 is paying to recover ground rather than to build it. Starting in DP1 also spreads the CAS strands across two years instead of cramming them into one. If you are already in DP2, begin with a single diagnostic session rather than a weekly booking, and decide from what that session finds.