Pros
This position is great as a part time job. Classes are typically taught on the weekends or weekday nights so there aren't many conflicts. The work is enjoyable. Teaching and tutoring students is valuable, challenging, and fulfilling. The pay is generous and is broken down into three tiers of hourly rates. The lowest tier is for answering students questions online. Instructors can login whenever from wherever, i.e. from your living room in your sweatpants, to answer these questions when they are available. The second tier of pay is for actually teaching lessons. This is about twice as much as answering questions online. The last tier is for individual tutoring which is about three times as much as answering questions online. The online questions and tutoring are wholly dependent on student demand. There are no guaranteed hours. I've been in a larger market and so I have had a steady supply of students to tutor. The online questions can disappear for weeks between seasons. You also get paid a paltry sum for prep hours, hours that you devote to preparing the lessons. These could be the most hours that you have in a pay period. If you have to travel a certain distance to the job site the reimbursements for gas and parking are nice and the administration is easy to deal with. The personnel that I've dealt with in the company, the administration and other instructors, are for the most part supportive and friendly. There is no one looking over your shoulder at your work, but this can also make you feel isolated.
Cons
The "training" session was brutal. I applied for the job and got a quick response. I was given an LSAT question and 24 hours to prepare a response in a phone interview to teach the question to the interviewer. I didn't find it too difficult but I found out later that something like 500 people had gone through the phone interviewer. Many don't get the question right or can't explain the right answer correctly. From there I was offered a place in the training program. It took place a week in a hotel near LAX. They fly you out and get you a room. The scheduled events for the training take up about 12 hours a day. They offer you a stipend for your time. I was told that nearly everyone makes it through the training, but that's not true at all. Only 12 people attended my training session. Half of them were cut. Some were cut and sent home the first day and some were cut on the very last day. It's not rare for people to attend training and not receive a job offer. In addition the days are long. Even if only 12 hours are scheduled, more time is needed to prepare for the mock class sessions. Most people in my training sessions were spending 16-20 hours each day total. Forget meals or consistent sleep. The training consists of lessons where training instructors teach you the material and mock classes. After the mock classes they give you feedback. Some of this is helpful, but other times it is contradictory and confusing. One training instructor will tell you that a certain trait is a strength and another training instructor will tell you that same trait is a weakness. The training instructors say they are available for additional support but they really aren't as they have their own scheduled meetings to attend. All in all the training week was hell. If you make it through then then the company party at the end and the job offer is really nice. The hours can be really inconsistent. If you have a class to teach then a single class is 8 hours a week. Some seasons you won't have a class. Classes are offered based on seniority and some seasons there aren't enough classes for all of the instructors so the senior instructors take up all of the classes. In addition to that inconsistency there is inconsistency in tutoring hours and online question hours. It adds up to an income source you cannot rely on. There is also a culture of working more hours than you bill. At first I was consistently preparing for twice as long as I said I was and I needed to in order to give the students a quality product.
