Policies
So that WTS can serve as many students as possible, tutorial appointments are limited to one per person per day, at any of our locations. Because WTS' mission is primarily to support undergraduate learning, graduate students are limited to two appointments per week, at any location.
Please schedule ONE appointment at a time. Once you have completed your tutorial, you may schedule another. Failure to follow this policy will result in the cancellation of your tutorials.
If you need to cancel an appointment at WTS, we ask that you do so as far in advance as possible before your appointment (so that another student can sign up for the appointment) and no later than the start time of the appointment. If you cancel an appointment after the start time or fail to show up for an appointment more than three times in a semester, you will not be allowed to make another appointment at WTS during that semester.
WTS enforces a 10-minute late policy for all appointments. If a student does not arrive within the first 10 minutes of a scheduled tutorial, the appointment will be cancelled.
Walk-in tutorials may be available at WTS' primary location in the Wells Library, depending on tutors' availability, but it is best to schedule an appointment a few days in advance.
Tutorials at the Academic Support Centers (ASCs) in Briscoe, Forest, and Teter are available on a walk-in basis only.
The following policies apply to walk-in tutorials:
- Walk-in tutorials operate on a first-come, first-served basis.
- At 6:00 p.m., the ASC staff will post a sign-up sheet. You should sign up on this sheet either for a 30-minute tutorial or a 60-minute tutorial. You must be present at the tutoring location at the time you signed up for; if you're not present, you may lose your time to another student. If all the slots on a sign-up sheet are full, do not add slots or start another sign-up sheet. Tutors will meet only with students who have signed up on the official sign-up sheet, and may refuse to meet with students who have added slots to the official sheets or started their own sheet.
- You may sign up for only one walk-in tutorial per day.
- Please do not interrupt the tutor while they are meeting with another student; tutors reserve the right to refuse to meet with students who interrupt them while they are helping other students.
- Each tutor will meet with only one student per time slot; tutors are not allowed to squeeze in more students than there are slots for on the sign-up sheet.
- To make your tutorial more productive, please think about what you'd like to work on with the tutor before your session begins. You and the tutor will have more time to address your concerns if you identify them for the tutor at the beginning of the session. You'll also save time by printing out both your assignment sheet and your draft (if you have one) before the tutorial begins.
WTS tutors do not proofread students' papers, in part because correcting students' work could be seen as assisting students in presenting someone else's academic work as their own. Therefore, if you want to work in your tutorial on correcting grammatical errors in your writing, a WTS tutor will not find and correct those errors for you. Instead, the tutor will go through the regular tutorial process with you, first listening to your concerns, then reading your paper, and talking with you about the kinds of grammatical errors you’re committing. Then, with the tutor’s help, you can learn how to avoid or correct these mistakes on your own.
We have adopted this policy at WTS because we see the writing support WTS provides as part of the University’s educational mission. We believe that we can best meet our goal of helping students to become better writers not by simply correcting grammatical errors for students, but instead by helping them strengthen their skills in all aspects of the writing process, including proofreading. As a result, we can’t promise that a student who has come to WTS will hand in a paper completely free of grammatical errors, even if the tutorial concentrated on grammatical problems, since the work of proofreading the paper is ultimately the student’s responsibility.
In general, WTS tutorials are confidential; that is, WTS does not routinely notify faculty members about which of their students have met with tutors at WTS. We have established this policy because we believe that some students may be more comfortable seeking help at WTS if they know that their professor will not be told that they have met with a tutor.
Under some circumstances, however, a faculty member may ask to be informed about whether a particular student has met with a WTS tutor. In this case, the faculty member should contact WTS (wts@indiana.edu) to request this information.
In other cases (for example, when a faculty member plans to offer extra credit to students who meet with WTS tutors), a faculty member may want to be informed about all the students in their course who have had tutorials. If the students are told ahead of time that their professor will be informed of their tutorials, we are happy to comply with this request. At a professor's request, WTS can provide a list of all students from the professor's course who have had tutorials at WTS or at any of our satellite locations. Alternatively, students from the professor's course who are tutored at WTS can have their papers stamped by the office manager as a form of proof that they have had a tutorial. In all cases, we will provide only the names of students who have been tutored and the dates of their tutorials; the details of the tutorial conversations will remain confidential.
If English is not your first language or if you are an international student, writing papers may seem like a daunting task. At WTS, we can help you in several different ways as you write. For example, we can help you understand the expectations of American readers, the conventions of standard academic English, and the ways in which arguments are constructed and evidence is used in the American academy. If you are concerned about grammatical errors in your writing, we can also help you learn how to proofread your prose.
However, there are a few services that we don't offer at WTS. We don't offer lessons in English grammar or conversational practice. We also don't proofread or edit students' papers, and if you are working on a dissertation we recommend that you hire a proofreader for pay.
Most students who seek help at WTS do so on a voluntary basis, but occasionally a faculty member will require some or all students from a course to be tutored at WTS. We discourage this practice for two reasons. First, WTS may not be able to accommodate all the students in a particular course within a short period of time. Although WTS offers over 200 hours of tutoring each week, in this time we must serve thousands of students in hundreds of courses across the University. Second, we have found that requiring tutorials of all students in a course is not effective; students who are required to be tutored often do not engage in the work of the tutorial with much interest and resist making major changes to their papers. As alternatives to required tutorials, faculty members may offer extra credit or a later due date for students who have had tutorials. Another way for a faculty member to encourage their students to seek help at WTS is to request that a WTS tutor be assigned to the course; we have found that when a course has had a course-specific tutor assigned, the students from that course are more likely to visit WTS.