Common questions about Tutory

What is Tutory?

Tutory is an AI tutor and conversational assessment platform for K–12 schools and school divisions. Instead of assigning a page to hand in, a teacher gives Tutory a reading, a unit, or the lesson they just taught. Tutory drafts a rubric from that material, and each student is assessed by talking it through with their own Socratic AI tutor. The teacher gets the transcript, the evidence tagged against each criterion, and makes the final call. Tutory is running paid pilots with teachers and school divisions in North America.

What is a conversational assessment?

A conversational assessment replaces the submitted page with a recorded conversation. In Tutory, every student in a class is held to the same teacher-approved rubric, but each conversation follows that student's own thinking — probing where it is thin, clearing up what they have backwards, and pushing further when they clearly have it. A conversation cannot end until it has covered every criterion, so forty different conversations stay comparable to one another. What gets marked is the reasoning the student produced live, in their own words, rather than an artifact that may have been produced anywhere.

How does Tutory work, step by step?

A Tutory assessment runs in four steps:

1. The teacher hands over the material — a reading, a unit, or the lesson just taught — and Tutory drafts assessment criteria from what is actually in it. The teacher keeps those criteria, edits them, or writes their own.
2. Each student opens a conversation with a Socratic AI tutor that knows exactly what the class covered.
3. The tutor follows that student's thinking, probing where it is thin, until every criterion in the rubric has been covered.
4. The teacher reviews the transcript, with evidence tagged against each criterion and linked to the turn it came from, and makes the mark.

Who is Tutory for?

Tutory is built for K–12 teachers, schools, and school divisions. A teacher can run it in a single class: hand over one reading, let it talk to students, and read what comes back. A division adopts it centrally, where the questions are about data residency, teacher oversight, and student disclosure — which is why Tutory treats each of those as a configuration and a guarantee rather than a promise. Tutory is currently offered as a paid pilot, deliberately starting small and growing where it works.

How does Tutory handle AI-written assignments?

Tutory answers AI in the classroom with proof rather than detection. Teachers report that every assignment now arrives finished, and a lot of it was written by a chatbot — which is not laziness, because the tool is free, on every phone, and very good at exactly that task. Tutory removes the thing that can be handed off. When the assessment is a live conversation held to the teacher's rubric, a student cannot submit someone else's work, because there is no submission — there is a conversation they had to hold up their end of.

Is Tutory an AI detector?

No. Tutory does not scan writing for signs of AI authorship and never produces a score or probability that a student cheated. Detection tools ask whether a finished artifact was written by a person, a question that cannot be answered reliably and puts teachers in the position of accusing students on statistical evidence. Tutory takes the opposite route: it changes the assessment so the evidence of learning is generated in front of the teacher in the first place. The output is a transcript a teacher can read, not a verdict they have to trust.

Does Tutory grade students?

No. Tutory never assigns a grade. It tags evidence against each criterion in the teacher's rubric and shows the exact conversational turn that evidence came from; the mark is made by a person who can see both. This is a design constraint in Tutory rather than a setting, and it is the same in every classroom and every division using the product. A teacher marks every criterion.

Does Tutory's tutor just give students the answers?

No. Tutory's tutor is Socratic by design: it will not hand over the answer, it asks the next question, and the one after that, until the student gets there themselves. It asks what a student would expect to happen and why, probes where the thinking is thin, and clears up misconceptions rather than overwriting them. Because the tutor is working from the teacher's own materials, wording, and sequence, it pushes on the specific thing that was taught instead of a generic syllabus. The conversation that gives the teacher proof is the same one that gives the student help.

What is Tutory's teaching assistant?

Tutory's teaching assistant is a place where every conversation in a class lands and can be questioned in plain language — for example, asking which students are still shaky on a particular concept. It reads across the whole room and shows the exact turns behind everything it reports, so a teacher can check the claim rather than take it. Then it stops. Tutory's assistant never marks a student, never messages one, and never changes anything in a class on its own. It drafts; the teacher decides what happens next.

Where do Tutory's rubrics come from?

Tutory drafts a rubric from the material the teacher hands over — the reading, the slides, the lesson just taught — so the criteria reflect what is actually in it rather than a generic standard. The teacher then keeps those criteria, edits them, or writes their own, and the rubric that runs is the one they approved. Every student's conversation is held to that same rubric, which is what makes a room full of different conversations comparable at the end.

Do students know their teacher will read the conversation?

Yes, and they are told before the first question. Every Tutory conversation opens by telling the student that the transcript goes to their teacher. There is no monitoring mode in Tutory and no way to switch that notice off — it is not a configurable setting that a school could disable. Nothing about a Tutory assessment happens in secret from the student taking it.

Where is student data stored?

Tutory offers data-residency options across North America today, with European regions coming. The storage region is a configuration setting on the school division rather than a support request, and the region that applies depends on the organization or account configuration. Tutory retains information for as long as it is needed to provide and secure the service, follow the organization's instructions, resolve disputes, and meet legal obligations. Tutory's full privacy notice is published at tutory.io/privacy.

Does Tutory sell student data or use it for advertising?

No. Tutory does not sell personal information and does not use student or teacher information for targeted advertising. Where a user signs in with Google, Tutory requests only the basic account information needed to authenticate them and connect them to the right account, and does not request access to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, or Google contacts. Tutory shares information only as needed to operate the service, at the direction of the organization using it, or when required by law.

Who can see a student's conversations in Tutory?

Teachers and authorized school staff can see the classroom information and student conversations that the product makes available to them, and the student is told at the start of every conversation that this is the case. Tutory is built for classroom use, so a school, division, or teacher provides student information and directs how it is used. The school or division remains responsible for its own notices, permissions, and legal obligations when it uses Tutory.

How does a school start using Tutory?

Tutory is running paid pilots for teachers and schools, and the intended starting point is one class rather than a rollout. A teacher hands Tutory one reading, lets it talk to their students, and reads what comes back; a division that wants a walkthrough can arrange one before committing to anything wider. Requests go through tutory.io/interest, and Tutory replies within two working days.

What does Tutory cost?

Tutory is sold as a paid pilot rather than from a public price list, because the scope of a pilot — how many teachers, how many classes, which division — is what sets the price. Tutory does not offer a free tier that trains on classroom data in exchange for access. The way to get a figure is to ask at tutory.io/interest with a sense of the size you have in mind.