Who can leave a review
Only a student who actually had the lesson can review it. To leave a review you must:
- have booked that specific lesson with that specific teacher, and
- have had the lesson — it must have taken place.
You cannot review a lesson that has not happened yet, and you cannot review a lesson that was cancelled. Each lesson can be reviewed once. This is enforced by the platform, not by a moderator checking afterwards — there is no way to post a review for a lesson you did not take.
Because a review is tied to a lesson that was booked and paid for, we do not accept reviews from people who have never had a lesson with that teacher.
We do not pay for reviews
We never offer credit, discounts, or anything else in exchange for leaving a review, and we never offer anything in exchange for a positive one. Teachers cannot pay to have reviews removed.
How the star rating is worked out
The rating you see on a teacher's profile is the plain average of every review they have received, shown to one decimal place, next to the number of reviews it is based on. Nothing is weighted, dropped, or hidden. A teacher with one review and a teacher with two hundred both show their true average — the review count beside it tells you how much to read into it.
What decides the order teachers appear in
When you browse or search without choosing a sort order, teachers are ordered by:
- Featured teachers first. Featured is set by us, by hand. It cannot be bought — teachers cannot pay us for placement, and no part of search ranking is for sale.
- Then by a rating score that accounts for how many reviews it is based on. We do not order by raw average, because a single five-star review would then outrank a teacher with fifty excellent ones. Instead a teacher's score starts near 4.0 and moves towards their true average as they gather reviews. In practice a teacher with five reviews at 5.0 ranks above one with twenty at 3.0, and a teacher with fifty at 4.9 ranks above one with a single 5.0.
- Then by number of reviews, to break a tie.
You can override this at any time using the sort control — by rating, by price, by experience, by lessons taught, or by newest. Sorting by rating uses the plain average, with the review count as a tie-break.
Filters you set — instrument, level, price, availability — only ever remove teachers who do not match. They never reorder the ones who do.
Moderation
We do not remove a review because a teacher disagrees with it, and we do not edit what you wrote. We will remove a review only where it is unlawful, abusive, names a third party, contains personal contact details, or is clearly not about a lesson that took place. If we remove a review we tell the person who wrote it and why, and they can ask us to look again.
Teachers cannot currently reply to reviews in public. We are working on it.
Reporting a review
If you think a review is fake, abusive, or breaks the rules above, contact us and tell us which teacher and which review. We will look at it and tell you what we decided.