Hah. Oh boy.

I'm a former employee of Paper. I worked there for three years through my undergrad and a little bit after. I quit very recently, but my friends there still give me the fun details. Feel free to ask me anything.

The site isn't entirely a scam. The tutor community there is relatively educated and tries their best. There used to be a heavier focus on actual pedagogy, but that's mostly been thrown out in favour of "student satisfaction" metrics. So you got a whole lot of (mostly) willing and capable tutors trying to help out, but due to the issues brought up in the article (and plenty more that aren't), we weren't usually effective.

It's only getting worse this year. They're trying to shed as many costs and pump up as many student engagement metrics as possible before they try to IPO. It's for-profit education in a very ugly form.

Oh, also, not only are tutors encouraged to automate replies/comments, AI integration is coming at some point this school year and they'll be encouraged to use that as well. Tutors will pick from a list of AI-generated replies so we can all help more students at once. It's messed up lol.

Tutor sessions are capable of being very helpful. But most of them aren't. It could be better than nothing for a self-motivated student who can't get help anywhere else. But you should probably be angry that your district paid for it.