Search for “best LSAT tutor” and you’ll get page after page of hits. There are the “promoted” sites at the top, followed by one LSAT company after another. If you’ve been looking for an LSAT tutor for a while, the names are all familiar. If you’ve just started, they’re all a blur. How can a person who doesn’t even know what they’re looking for find what they need?
Lawchooli.com has a post that offers some objective criteria for choosing a great tutor. The entire article is worth reading but here’s the short version if you’re in a hurry:
Try to find a tutor who scored at the 99th percentile. Your tutor should be better at this than you are!
Get someone with a good reputation. Check reviews, ratings, word of mouth.
Experience is helpful, but it isn’t everything. A lot of younger tutors just took the LSAT themselves.
If you’re going to spend money on a tutor, spend enough to get a good one.
Try before you buy. If the tutoring company doesn’t offer some kind of “good fit guarantee” (where you only pay for your first session if the tutor is right for you), then only sign up for an hour or two for starters.
The Lawschooli article assumes people are looking for in-person tutoring in a local area. The LSAT, however, is a perfect fit for online tutoring. Everything a tutor and a student really need to do together can easily be accomplished on an interactive whiteboard.
WyzAnt (the tutoring service I use) currently has more than 300 self-employed online LSAT tutors. Unlike some of the big LSAT companies, which select their reviews, WyzAnt posts every rating and every review, whether it is flattering or embarassing. You can sort prospective tutors by price, rating, or “best match.” You may have to scroll down a bit to find me (I’m still fairly new to WyzAnt, and if you’re sorting from highest price to lowest, I’m way down the list), but you’ll find other people in this series right up at the top.