Course Hero

What: Take notes or tutor other college students

Expected pay: nominal

Husl $core: $SSSS

Where: National

Requirements:

Be over the age of 18;
have study notes to share or be capable of tutoring others in a college-level class

Review: Course Hero purports to be all about helping students get better grades by giving them access to course materials and tutors. However, both contributors/tutors and clients 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 hours doing the site’s bidding. 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.

We found complaints at the Better Business Bureau, InsideHigherEd, ScamBook, ComplaintsBoard and countless others. The complaints are pretty consistent. Our advice: No matter whether you’re a client or a contributor, steer clear.

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

What their contributors/tutors say:

“I worked on this site as expert for 2 years or so. My experience with site has been very bad. They treat experts as puppet and remove experts as and when they desire without giving any chance to improve. They will say that you have violated site policy and you are hereby removed and in this process, whatever balance you have in your account is taken away by the company. This is like looting experts. Further, I had observed, many times, that only I had submitted the answer and my answer was correct. Still I was not paid. It means that company was eating money earned from students/customers. They don’t inform whether your answer has been accepted or not. It is on their will whether you will be paid or not. Payment is very low. Initially, it is only 35% and gradually it is increased to 50%. If anybody wants to make career as expert, don’t depend on coursehero.com. He/she should look anywhere else.”

“Course hero are stealing from their tutors by closed their accounts irregularly. The accounts are closed with the accumulated tutors’ earnings.”

“Seems the people at Course Hero tend to suck your original works into their online database, use those works to entice poor students into a subscription and then kick the original user 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 I was closed for “honor violation.” I suppose that’s one way to pad the database with fresh content.”

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 one day a mail came saying I received violation. The reason they gave was totally a bu***it. Then my account was blocked. The system here is, student 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.”