Course Hero: Tutors Call The Site Villianous

What is Course Hero?

Course Hero purports to be all about helping students get better grades by giving them access to course materials and tutors. And it invites educators and tutors to sign up and provide help through study notes and answering student questions.

How it works

If you want to sign up to tutor here, you must register with the site and say what subjects you’re interested in.

Registering means that you have accepted the site’s terms, which are a binding contract between you and Course Hero. Among other things, these terms say that you are not an employee; you only get paid to answer questions. And you give Course Hero a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use any content (that includes your answers) you add to the site into perpetuity.

The site currently (3/2025) only accepts tutors who live in India or the Philippines.

If you’re accepted as a tutor, you’ll be able to see questions that students have and how much the site will pay you to answer them.

Course Hero Review:

Contributors, tutors, and clients alike describe this company as villainous.

Clients maintain they get charged exorbitant fees for worthless information and can’t get the company to stop auto-charging their credit cards.

Contributors and tutors maintain that the company inexplicably closes their accounts — absconding with their earnings — after they’ve spent weeks doing the site’s bidding. How the site gets away with absconding with money earned by tutors is unclear. But tutors say it happens all the time.

Tutor guidance

One possible way they may get away with not paying for answers comes from the site’s “guidance” in how to answer student questions. This explanation says tutors get paid for “correct answers and helpful explanations.” Helpful, of course, is a relative term. And, arguably, “correct” can also be a judgement call in everything but math.

Is this how the site manages to deny pay to freelancers? Possibly. The site also has a litany of rules and an “honor code” that tutors say it can use to boot them from the site and abscond with their earnings.

Rotten best-case

Even in the best of cases, earnings are nothing to brag about. Tutors earn between $1 and $4 for answering student questions. If someone buys your notes, you’ll get between $5 and $20, according to a site representative.

Course Hero maintains that top tutors can earn $1,500 per month. We see no way to verify this. The site adds that “actual earnings may vary depending on number of questions answered, subject category, question difficulty, answer quality, and other factors.”

We found complaints at the Better Business Bureau, InsideHigherEd, ScamBook, ComplaintsBoard, SiteJabber and countless others. The complaints are pretty consistent. The site pays poorly, if it pays at all.

Recommendations

Our advice: No matter whether you’re a client or a contributor, steer clear.

If you want to tutor, we recommend signing up with Wyzant. The site allows you to set your own rates and specialties, determine your own schedule and doesn’t require specific credentials. Wyzant takes a 25% commission on your earnings when you book a client. But tutors don’t have any complaints about getting paid. You can sign up with Wyzant here.

If you want to get paid to take class notes, check out Nexus Notes or Study Soup.

What their contributors/tutors say (from SiteJabber)

They are stealing hard-earned money from tutors by wrongfully closing their accounts. They never even clarify the reasons. And it is not just a few tutors—it is a lot of us. It is like spring cleaning but with tutors’ hard-earned money.

Course Hero wrongfully terminated my tutor account & stole my $600 in earnings due to a technical issue THEY caused. I’m not the only one—many tutors have faced the same! This is unacceptable.

True and false

It is true that you will get to solve questions and each question comes with a price. The money gets credited almost after 25 days in total and they will let you withdraw some money first. But when you get a flow of solving, they will suddenly disable your account forever. Your due payments for the solutions you already provided will not be given to you. They neither send your due payment nor let you withdraw. And they will stop replying to any of your emails.

They are a shady site and harassing their tutors. They will pay you initially but they will ban your account without mentioning any reason after few days.

Took my money

I strongly advise against becoming a Course Hero tutor. Many tutors have had the same experience – they begin working and are given positive reviews. Once they have some money ready to withdraw, their account is closed with no reason provided and no way to access their earnings. It is a scam. They steal your money.

I was a tutor. Earned a little and they reported unusual activity and permanently disabled my account before I could withdraw my earnings. Scammers.

Robbed

They closed my account in a fishy manner claiming cyber security $#*!. And then took the money that I had earned and failed to send it, citing the account is closed.

They disabled my account and robbed me of my earnings. They don’t answer emails regarding payment. Don’t join this site. Initially, everything looks amazing, but shortly after, you realize it is all a scam.

As a former tutor, I guarantee that Coursehero just exploits tutors and students. Don’t even think of applying and sending your personal information to them.

From Indeed

You can work on the go, anywhere you like — wherever you are. It can also be a good side hustle on top of your full-time job. They also accept university students. But base pay used to be $3 now they reduced it to $1.50, Less questions to answer, low pay for a difficult question.

I wasn’t able to continue working here because they just decided to close my account for no reason, and I hadn’t even received any violations. They literally just revoked it without prior notice. So, I still have some remaining pending money in that account and wasn’t able to withdraw it because they didn’t even respond to any of my emails.

You can answer as much questions as you would like. Pay is dependent on the amount of questions answered. Pay is also good. Minimum price is $2 per question.

Tutors don’t get paid all the time even if they are correct. the management always sides with the student. unfair treatment to the tutor’s capabilities.

From TrustPilot

The only problem I encountered was when I tried to withdraw the money. I encoded my mobile number and got a prompt message directing me to ask assistance to contact support. I did. And what I received as a response is that they are permanently closing my account due to violation they can’t even specify. I keep sending them message but no response.

I was a tutor on the Course Hero platform for just over 3 years and had answered 100s of questions in that time. In previous years, I had no issues getting paid and had a 100% helpful rating in my subjects. Recently started answering questions regularly and within 10 days, with $70 USD accumulated, I was permanently removed without warning and without cause from the platform. There is no right to appeal and they refuse to pay me for the work done. Course Hero does not act with integrity.

And….

I just started out so I am not sure how it is long-term. However, I definitely do not think you can make a lot working here. Some students post pages of questions when it is only suppose to be one question. If the student does not review you then you do not get paid. You could help multiple students and get no money if they did not review you.

Took my earnings

I had barely made through a week. And due to the hard work I had put because I worked 12hrs a day, I made $500 which all went with them after the first week. I was not given any reason why they closed the account. Course Hero just logged me out and the password was changed.

They blocked me from tutor account and even didn’t pay my $100 hard earned money. Please don’t trust Course Hero they are the biggest scammer in education industry.

Bad experience

I worked on this site as expert for 2 years or so. My experience has been very bad. They treat experts as puppets and remove experts as and when they desire. They will say that you have violated site policy. In this process, whatever balance you have in your account is taken away. Further, I had observed, many times, that only I had submitted the answer and my answer was correct. Still I was not paid.

Course Hero steals from their tutors by closing their accounts. The accounts are closed taking with the accumulated tutors’ earnings.

They steal from tutors

The people at Course Hero suck your original works into their online database, use those works to entice poor students into a subscription and then kick the original user off the site as an “honor violator.” Pretty cheesy. I created an account and found my own content on the Course Hero site (my original essays, multi-choice answers, etc) with my page codes. All after my account was closed for “honor violation.” I suppose that’s one way to pad the database with fresh content.”

Blocked

I worked as a tutor on CourseHero. Since my subjects are actually my passion, in a very short time I answered a lot of questions. All of a sudden an email came saying I received a violation. The reason they gave was totally a bu***it. Then my account was blocked. The system here is, students pay and post the question. When I answer the question, I get just 35% of what student paid after 14 days. For 14 days before my account got blocked I answered almost 150 questions for which I was about to get around $250. All that money they stole. Whatever be the fu***ng reason for deactivation, at least they should pay whatever earned before that point.”

“They stole all my hard earned money. I was a 5 stars rating tutor there, but when time came for withdrawing the fund, these bastards just removed my account…. scammers.”

Updated 3/23/2025