Category: Announcements

As promised, we have fleshed out our plans for grading policy changes over near- and long-term. Here are the upcoming changes:

Immediate Policy Updates

Remove the student feedback channel

• Tracking students individually is a manual and unscalable task
• The channel has shifted away from its purpose of providing tips on how to work with students and towards understandable, but ultimately unproductive, venting; we would like Yup tutors to enter each session on a “blank slate” with students
• As we move to school focus, we will explore other forms of feedback
• You are still welcome to message Henry/Sharon individually about major concerns with student behavior

Continue removing scores from misaligned students

• As in June, we intend to remove scores from misaligned students based on internal investigation for July; this has the most impact without undue manual/engineering work

Near Term Policy Updates

Formalize TQM ability to nullify a session

• We will be changing the first question from “Did the tutor ask instructional questions?” to “Was student engagement reasonably within the tutor’s control?” at the start of each session feedback; TQMs may select “No” and nullify the session
• TQMs will undergo training and norming process to ensure grading is fair; however, we will continue to not allow disputes

Long Term Policy Updates

Engineering to add nulls by strand feature

• In the coming months, we will introduce a feature to allow TQMs to score certain strands and not others based on student engagement

Yup Resource Spotlight

We’ve had a number of requests regarding how we onboard teachers and students and introduce UPSCR. We’ll be releasing materials weekly so that you can see how your hard work is translated in the classroom!

For week one, check out our Pitch Deck: what we go through with schools during introductory calls!

Vacation

And finally, the Yup HQ team will be taking some hard earned vacation!

• Henry: 7/20-7/24 (shift auditing may be delayed, no newsfeed post)
• Sharon: 7/27-7/31
• Kreg: 7/23-7/24

Hi Yup Tutors. We hope you’re excited for the Summer period!

Update on the UPSCR Rollout Process

June 1: 4/1 – 5/31 TGP metrics confirmed, TGP levels updated for Summer; UPSCR grading officially goes into effect

June 5: May payroll distributed

June 8: New UPSCR tutor workbooks rolled out with June data

UPSCR Cutoffs

Please see below for the new UPSCR cutoffs. This reflects current tutor performance. We anticipate scores rising as tutors become more comfortable with UPSCR and students become more aligned with the process. We’ll review this policy and update cutoffs as needed.

Cycle

Level	Description	All Sessions	Cycle Score
5	Quality Manager	500	7.5
4	Master Yup Tutor	300	6.5
3	Distinguished Yup Tutor	100	5.0
2	Yup Tutor	25	3.0
1	New Yup Tutor	0	N/A

Monthly Bonus

Tier	Description	Graded Sessions	Monthly Score
2	Exemplary	15	TQM: 8.0 Non-TQM: 7.5
1	Strong	10	TQM: 7.5 Non-TQM: 6.5

Announcing Q&A With Director of Academics Kreg Moccia

We’re excited to announce an open Q&A with Kreg, our Director of Academics! Please use this link both to submit questions and upvote ones you find interesting from today until June 1. Kreg will respond as quickly as possible (we anticipate a response to ~1 question per day) in the Yup Chat channel in Tutor Slack.

Hi Yup Tutors!

Based on your feedback, we’re excited to announce new guidelines for how Yup will engage with Tutor Slack effectively.

Standard Guidelines

Yup will engage with Tutor Slack based on the following guidelines. We ask that Tutors exhaust other resources before reaching out to us directly, such as checking Policy Guides in our Resources Page or reaching out to other Yup Tutors.

Channel	Owner	Response Frequency
Announcements	Ops (Henry)	As needed
Bug Reporting	Ops (Henry)	Emergencies; Update Posts
Emergency Response	Ops (Henry)	As needed
General	Ops (Sharon)	As needed
Math Help	Ops (Sharon)	As needed
New Ideas	Ops (Henry)	Once per week (Friday EOD)
Scheduling	Ops (Henry)	As needed
Student Feedback	CS (Jayda)	Emergencies; Update Posts
Yup Chat	Ops	Once per day (EOD)
Direct Messages	NA	Once per day (EOD)

Bug Reporting

We’ve updated our Bug Reporting Instructions to create a more streamlined way to track and fix bugs. While we encourage all tutors to review in detail, here are the most important commitments:

Yup HQ

• Provide clear guidelines on how to report bugs through a Tutor Guide
• Offer a simple, quick-to-complete process for tutors to submit bugs
• Post ad-hoc updates in the #bug-reporting channel that cover:
  • Bug diagnosis, prioritization, and completed fixes
  • Recommended quick-fix tips for specific bugs (e.g., cache clearing)

Yup Tutors

• Agree to report all bugs using the designated reporting tools
• Include all relevant detail – the more information, the easier to fix!
• Understand that Yup cannot respond to each report, but is aggregating information to prioritize and fix bugs as quickly as possible

Student Feedback

We’ve also updated our Student Feedback Reporting Instructions to create a more streamlined way to track behavioral gaps and reach out to students. While we encourage all tutors to review in detail, here are the most important commitments:

Yup HQ

• Customer Success (CS) team will use submissions to the Student Behavior form to aggregate information and prioritize to resolve the most prominent student behavior issues
• When an incident warrants outreach to the student, parent, or teacher a CS Team member will be assigned to the case.  They will notify the #student_feedback slack channel our outreach plan and update accordingly

Yup Tutors

• Become familiar with the Levels of Student Behavior chart (in document)
  • Any Level 3 behavior should be submitted to the #student_feedback channel immediately.  Please tag @nicole and @jayda in the channel. 
• Use Student Behavior form for all feedback (Level 1 through 3) to submit a request for CS to investigate a student.  
• Use #student_feedback slack channel to notify other tutors about the student

Thank You

Last but not least, a huge thank you to Yup Tutors. We think what we’re all doing together with UPSCR is completely revolutionary for online tutoring and a true move in the right direction to making sure students come out of a tutoring session having learned, not just gotten to an answer. And we’re excited for what the future holds!

As always, please reach out to tutor.support@yup.com with any questions and Happy Tutoring!

Thank you for joining us for our overview webinar and for all the feedback! Please make sure that you join the Learning Standards Slack channel to ask any questions about implementation.

As we roll out our the Learning Standards, tutors should expect policy updates. We have two policy announcements today:

Overtime Announcement

From now on, we’ll ask tutors to limit their OT work to completing the problem at hand. If you are already in OT and the student would like to start a new and unique problem, please use the Shift Ending canned response and end the session after the student has acknowledged it! If the student pushes back, apologize once more saying that you have to go, and then end the session. However, if you feel the next problem builds upon the previous problem, feel free to continue working and we’ll trust tutor discretion.

Student Ratings Announcement

We will no longer use student ratings in any tutor performance metrics starting with our new Learning Standards rollout in June! We’ll still use ratings until then, per current policy. But, if we notice ratings drop as tutors test our new Learning Standards, we will determine alternative measures. So don’t feel afraid to implement and experiment with these new standards!

We look forward to seeing you next week at our Understand webinar on our normal schedule!