With the high failure rate at the Baccalaureate in Romania and the tutoring of students ahead of major exams carried out as an illegal money making activity commonplace, a new trend is emerging in Romania: organized private tutoring. A group of maths teachers recently founded a center dedicated to maths tutoring for final year high school students for their Baccalaureate exam.

The fee for private math tutoring will be of RON 120 plus VAT a week, which means that in eight months, the center might cash in some EUR 50,000, if it runs at full capacity.

The Bucur Center for Math, which will start working on October 1 in Bucharest, aims to tutor 50 students in the first year and wants to reach a 100 percent pass rate at the Baccalaureate exam for its students in 2013.

This is the first project of its kind in Romania and develops a trend that has been around in Romania for years: students taking private tutoring lessons from teachers – sometimes the teachers they have at school – ahead of major exams. Most of this activity was done on the so called black market, and tutoring was a way for state – paid teachers to bump up their revenues.

“We offer parents safety and the possibility to check the level of their children's learning at all times. Nobody offers something like this – apart from a diagnosis of problems the student might have, we supply the solution for parents – a personalized action plan and a step by step monitoring of progress,” said Calin Bucur, one of the founders of the project. Parents will have online accounts to check on the progress of their children. “Parents don't know how to check, in traditional systems, whether their children are really learning maths. They don't know if the child progresses, if they work extra or just attend classes. Maths, realistically speaking is a foreign language. We will translate it for parents,” Bucur explains.

The center, located in an office building in downtown Bucharest, will organize two weekly classes, in groups of nine students and three students, respectively. Founders and teachers in the center are members of the Romanian Mathematics Society, which edits the locally famous Maths Gazette. '

Romania had a 50 percent failure rate at the Baccalaureate exam, continuing the increasing trend in recent years. Despite the high failure rate, some Romanian students are clearly hot stuff with maths, as the country ranked first in Europe after this year's Math Olympiad, and 10th in the world, with two golds, three silvers and one bronze medal.

Corina Chirileasa, corina@romania-insider.com

(photo source: Bucur Math Center)