To: Dr.

Chio Flores
Vice President, Student Services
1300 Fifth Street
Wenatchee, WA 98801

From: Luke Schwarz

Employee of Wenatchee Valley College
1162 Jupiter Street
East Wenatchee WA, 98802

Re: WriteLab and Tutor Center Evaluation

Date: May 29, 2018

Introduction

The goal of this report is to identify if there is a sufficient amount of tutoring available to the
students of WVC and what areas might need adjustments to better fit the needs of these
students. I will present the data that I found in my research and explain what it shows about the
tutoring program. I will also share my conclusion which stats what areas of the tutoring program
that seem to need some readjusting to fit the needs of the students.

Background

Location and Hours:

WVC has two tutoring facilities that are open to its students. These facilities are the WriteLab
and the Tutor Center. The WriteLab is located in room 6004 of Sexton Hall and is open from
7:30am-5:00pm Monday-Thursday and 7:30am-3:00pm on Friday. These hours apply to all
quarters except for Summer quarter which has hours of 7:30am-5:00pm Monday-Wednesday
and 7:30am-3:00pm on Thursday. As for the Tutor Center it is located in the upstairs of the John
A. Brown Library and is open from 8:00am-6:00pm Monday-Thursday and 8:00am-5:00pm on
Friday. These hours apply to every quarter, but the Tutor Center does not open until the second
week of classes and closes for finals week.

Subjects:
The WriteLab focuses solely on tutoring students who need help with writing assignments. They
will go over student’s paper with them and show them the areas that need Improvements, such
as grammatical errors and revisions. Their basic goal is to help students prepare a solid piece of
written work that fits the teaches standards. The Tutoring Center on the other hand offers a wide
variety of subjects in which they tutor. The subjects that they tutor are Accounting, Anatomy,
Physiology, Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Economics, Mathematics, Microbiology, Physics,
Spanish, Japanese, and Statistics.
Tutors:
The WriteLab currently has a total of nine tutor including one Head Tutor (Shank). There is
almost always two tutors in the WriteLab that are available to students when they have
questions or need someone to take a look at their paper (Shank). These tutors are primarily
part-time employees of WVC and are paid using the English department's budget, but there are
some students who are part-time tutors and they receive work-study funding from the federal
government (Shank). As for the Tutor Center I am not quite sure how many tutors they have, but
I do know that they usually do not have enough tutors to have long one on one tutor sessions,
but instead they will answer you questions and move on to other students seeking help. Also I
found out that they do have some trouble finding tutors that can help students with MATH 107
and Accounting (Larch). They pay their tutors anywhere from $12.00-$14.00 an hour depending
on the number of academic years they have tutored and their qualifications.

Findings

From the information that I have collected it seems like the WriteLab and Tutor Centers provide
an adequate amount of time for students to seek help. They are open most weekdays for
around seven to eight hour which will accommodate for most of WVC’s students. Their facilities
are also easily accessible to all students. They also do a fantastic job of advertising the tutoring
programs on the WVC website and with fliers posted around campus. Seeing that almost all
students know that there is tutoring help available if they need it I don’t think there are any
issues there (Larch). When it comes to the kinds of subjects that they cover they do a fairly
good job of accommodating to the needs of students, but they do have some trouble with finding
tutors that can help students with MATH 107 and Accounting (Larch). They do have a sufficient
number of tutors in the WriteLab, but the Tutor Center sometimes struggles to keep up with the
amount of students that come in and getting them the one on one time that they really need.
They mainly struggle during times when they are busier which is usually 10:00am-1:00pm and
especially when midterms and finals are approaching (Larch).

Conclusion
The research that I have done on the WriteLab and Tutor Center shows that there are no major
flaws with these tutoring programs, but there are some places that could use some minor
improvements. For the most part they have a sufficient amount of tutors in the Tutor Center, but
they do get stretched a little bit thin when they get busy. At their busiest hours from 10:00am-
1:00pm and in preparation for midterms and finals I suggest that they find a couple more tutors
to help out so that they can provide the most help possible for the students. Also another minor
problem that I noticed was that they sometimes have trouble finding MATH 107 and Accounting
tutors so they might think about trying to advertise those positions more or offering a higher
hourly wage to anyone willing to tutor in those subjects.
 Works Cited

Amy Shank, Informational Interview, 05/29/2018

Mistie Larch, Informational Interview, 05/29/2018