Tutoring Code of Conduct

This Tutoring Code of Conduct (“Code”) sets the behavioural and professional standards for the afterhours tutoring marketplace. Tutoring works only if people can book, learn, and get paid without fear of harm, cheating, or unfair dealing.

The marketplace is operated by broke money, trading as afterhours.study and Afterhours (“afterhours”, “we”, “us”). afterhours is a platform that connects students with independent tutors. We do not employ tutors, and we do not ourselves provide the tutoring in a booked session.

This Code sits alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. If there is a conflict about marketplace behaviour, this Code and the tutoring sections of the Terms apply together. We may refuse, pause, or end marketplace access where this Code is breached.

This Code applies to everyone who uses tutoring on afterhours, including:

• people who apply to become tutors, whether or not they are approved
• approved tutors, including while their listing is paused
• students who browse, request, book, attend, review, or dispute sessions
• anyone messaging, meeting, or exchanging materials in connection with a booking

Tutors must read and agree to this Code when they apply. Students agree to it by using tutoring features, which are also covered by our Terms of Service. The Code continues to apply after a session ends in respect of leftover materials, reviews, disputes, and any follow-up contact that arose from the booking.

You must:

• treat others with respect, patience, and good faith
• be honest about identity, qualifications, availability, and what a session will cover
• keep learning support legitimate — help people understand, do not do their assessed work for them
• protect privacy and only use personal information for the booking
• keep tutoring on the platform, including payment
• put safety first, especially for in-person meetings
• report serious concerns promptly rather than ignoring them

afterhours tutoring must be a place where students and tutors of every background can participate. You must not harass, bully, threaten, humiliate, or discriminate against anyone on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, religion, age, family status, or any other status protected by New Zealand law.

The following are never acceptable, online or in person:

• sexual comments, sexual jokes, unwanted touching, or requests for sexual or romantic contact
• hate speech, slurs, or content that demeans a person or group
• intimidation, stalking, doxxing, or sharing someone’s private information to punish or expose them
• repeated contact after the other person has asked you to stop
• using a session, chat, or review to attack someone’s character rather than describe the tutoring

A single serious incident can be enough for removal. A pattern of smaller incidents can be as well. Joking, “banter”, or claiming the other person did not object at the time does not make this conduct acceptable.

Tutoring is a professional learning relationship. Tutors and students must keep it that way.

• Do not start or pursue a romantic or sexual relationship with someone you met through afterhours tutoring while a booking relationship exists, and do not use tutoring as a way to date.
• Do not ask for, or send, intimate images or sexual messages.
• Do not add students or tutors on personal social media, messaging apps, or private phone numbers in order to move the relationship off the platform, except where a public meeting-place detail is needed for an in-person session you have already booked.
• Do not give medical, legal, immigration, mental-health, or other professional advice beyond ordinary study support. If someone is in distress, encourage them to use appropriate help and, if there is immediate danger, contact emergency services.
• Do not offer tutoring in subjects or at a level you are not competent to teach.
• Do not attend a session under the influence of alcohol or drugs in a way that impairs judgement or makes the other person uncomfortable.

If a boundary is crossed, you may end the session, leave an in-person meeting, and report the incident to afterhours. You do not have to continue a session that feels unsafe or inappropriate.

Tutors must be accurate in applications, profiles, and listings. Students must be accurate in booking requests.

• Use your real identity for verification and payouts. Display names may be a preferred name, but they must not impersonate someone else or mislead students about who will teach the session.
• Describe your institution, programme, year level, subjects, and experience truthfully. Do not claim degrees, grades, or teaching credentials you do not have.
• Keep availability, mode (online or in person), location notes, and rates up to date.
• Do not create multiple tutor accounts to evade a suspension, inflate reviews, or game search.
• Students must not book under a false identity, book on behalf of someone else without saying so, or misrepresent the course or assessment they need help with.

We may require identity verification (including photo identification and a selfie, processed by Stripe) before a tutor can list or be paid. Providing false documents, or asking someone else to verify on your behalf, is a serious breach.

Tutoring exists to help people learn. It must not be used to cheat. This applies even if a student asks, offers extra money, or says “everyone does it”.

Tutors must not, and students must not ask tutors to:

• complete assignments, essays, lab reports, theses, or other assessed work that the student will submit as their own
• sit tests, quizzes, exams, or online assessments in the student’s place, or coach in real time during a closed-book or invigilated assessment where that is prohibited
• write or substantially rewrite assessed work so that the student can submit it without genuine authorship
• share restricted exam papers, answer keys, or other materials the tutor or student is not allowed to distribute
• help a student plagiarise, collude where collusion is forbidden, or otherwise breach their institution’s academic integrity rules
• share afterhours or university login credentials

Legitimate tutoring includes explaining concepts, working through similar practice problems, reviewing a student’s own draft with comments, helping plan study, and preparing for assessments in a way the student’s institution allows. When in doubt, stay on the side of teaching, not producing the submission.

You remain responsible for your own academic conduct. afterhours is not a party to your institution’s disciplinary process, but we may suspend marketplace access and cooperate where the law allows if we receive a credible report of cheating.

Once a session is booked, both people should treat it as a real commitment.

• Be on time. Join the Meet link, or arrive at the agreed public place, at the scheduled start. If you will be more than a few minutes late, message through afterhours as soon as you can.
• Tutors should prepare using the subject, student note, and any materials the student shared for that booking.
• Students should come ready to work: bring the brief, questions, or drafts they want to cover, and say if the plan has changed.
• Stay for the booked duration unless you both agree to finish early. Do not cut a paid session short without a good reason.
• Keep the session focused on the agreed subject. Do not turn it into unrelated work, selling, recruiting, or personal counselling.
• If the wrong person turns up, the listing was misleading, or the session cannot reasonably proceed, end it and report the issue rather than improvising something unsafe.

Online sessions are typically hosted on a video link we generate (for example Google Meet). You should:

• use the official session link from afterhours, not a random personal meeting room, unless both of you have agreed a workaround because the official link failed
• join from a reasonably private, appropriate setting — not a noisy party, driving a vehicle, or a place where confidential student work is on speaker in public
• not add extra guests to the call without the other person’s agreement
• not record, screenshot, or capture the session, chat, or shared work without clear consent from everyone on the call
• not share the Meet link with people who are not part of the booking

afterhours does not currently provide built-in session recording. If a link fails, try again, check your connection, and contact support if you cannot start the session. Do not demand that the other person use an unsafe or unknown tool.

In-person tutoring is optional. Tutors choose whether to offer it. Students choose whether to book it. afterhours does not supervise the meeting and cannot guarantee your safety in the physical world.

If you meet in person you must:

• meet in a public, well-lit, appropriate place such as a campus library, student centre, café, or other staffed public space — not a private home, hostel room, vehicle, or isolated area, unless afterhours has expressly approved a different arrangement in writing (we generally will not)
• tell a trusted person where you are going, who you are meeting, and when you expect to finish
• keep the meeting to the booked purpose and duration
• leave immediately if you feel unsafe, pressured, or if the other person asks you to go somewhere private
• not carry weapons or illegal items to a session
• follow any venue rules, campus policies, and public health guidance
• not bring unannounced extra people to the meeting

Location notes on a tutor profile are a guide, not a guarantee that a particular room will be free. Confirm a public meeting point through afterhours before you travel. Do not share your home address.

You meet in person at your own risk, subject to non-excludable rights under New Zealand consumer law. If something goes wrong, get to safety first, contact emergency services if needed (111 in New Zealand), then tell afterhours.

Use afterhours for booking, rescheduling, session notes, and disputes. Limited off-platform contact is allowed only where it is reasonably needed to complete a booked session (for example “I am at the library entrance in a blue jacket”).

You must not:

• pressure someone for their phone number, social handles, or personal email as a condition of tutoring
• message a student or tutor about non-tutoring topics after they have asked you to stop
• use afterhours messages to spam, advertise unrelated services, or recruit for other platforms
• contact someone you met through tutoring at their university, workplace, or home without a legitimate session reason

Session notes, student work, grades, personal circumstances, and anything you see in a session are confidential. Use them only to deliver that tutoring.

• Do not share another person’s notes, drafts, recordings, photos, or personal information with classmates, group chats, social media, or other tutors.
• Do not keep copies of a student’s assessed work after you no longer need them for that booking, except where afterhours stores session notes in the product.
• Do not look up, scrape, or publish private profile or booking information.
• Tutors must not discuss a particular student with others in a way that identifies them, including in reviews of afterhours itself.
• If you upload materials into afterhours, you must have the right to use them, and they must comply with our Terms of Service on copyright.

Our Privacy Policy explains how afterhours handles personal information, including identity checks, payouts, and session records.

Students pay for sessions through afterhours at checkout. The student pays the tutor’s listed rate plus a platform fee. Tutors receive their listed rate; the platform fee is charged to the student, not taken out of the tutor’s rate. Payouts are requested by the tutor from the tutor dashboard and are processed through Stripe Connect — they are not automatic.

You must not:

• ask for or make payment outside afterhours (cash, bank transfer, another app, “mates rates” off the books) for work that was arranged through the marketplace
• offer a discount if the other person cancels on afterhours and pays you directly
• inflate a listed rate and then rebate the platform fee privately
• use afterhours only as a directory to move ongoing tutoring off the platform

Sharing a public meeting point is not, by itself, a breach. Soliciting or accepting off-platform payment for afterhours-originated tutoring is. Repeated circumvention can lead to removal and forfeiture of unpaid balance where the Terms allow.

Cancel in the product as soon as you know you cannot attend. More than 24 hours’ notice is the expected standard except for illness, emergencies, or platform faults.

• Do not repeatedly cancel at short notice, ghost bookings, or fail to join without a message.
• If you will be late, say so. More than 15 minutes late without contact may be treated as a no-show.
• Tutors should not accept bookings they cannot keep. Students should not book times they already know they will miss.
• Rescheduling should be done through afterhours. Tutors can propose a new time in product where that feature is available; students may cancel and rebook.

Refunds are not automatic when a session is cancelled. We may refund, partially refund, or decline a refund depending on timing, who cancelled, whether the session ran, consumer law, and any dispute. Repeated no-shows or late cancellations can lead to warnings, paused listings, or removal.

Reviews must be honest, relevant to the tutoring, and free of harassment. Do not:

• leave fake reviews, reviews for sessions that did not happen, or reviews in exchange for payment or favours
• pressure a student to leave a five-star review, or a tutor to refund in exchange for taking a review down
• include another person’s private information, sexual comments, or discriminatory content in a review
• use reviews to continue a personal dispute that should go through the dispute process

We may remove reviews that breach this Code or the Terms, and we may investigate unusual review patterns.

Tutors must be 18 or older and able to complete identity verification and Stripe payout onboarding. The wider afterhours Service may be used by younger students with appropriate permission, but the tutoring marketplace is intended for adult learners and adult tutors.

If you believe a participant is under 18, do not continue an in-person session in a private setting, do not request personal contact details, and tell afterhours. You must never sexualise, groom, or request images from anyone, and you must not continue a session if you suspect the other person is a child using an adult account.

If you think a child is at risk, contact the appropriate authorities. In New Zealand, emergency services are 111. You may also contact afterhours so we can suspend marketplace access where needed.

In addition to the rules above, you must not:

• use tutoring to commit fraud, money laundering, or unauthorised card use
• impersonate afterhours staff, another tutor, or an institution
• scrape listings, automate bookings, or interfere with other people’s accounts
• upload malware, or use sessions to phish for passwords or one-time codes
• weaponise disputes with false claims, or threaten reputational harm to extract a refund or extra payment
• ignore a suspension or create a new account to get around one
• do anything else that is unlawful, or that a reasonable person would see as a serious abuse of a tutoring marketplace

Report safety issues, harassment, cheating, no-shows, and payment problems promptly. Use in-product dispute tools where they fit the situation, or email legal@afterhours.study. If you are in immediate danger, contact emergency services first.

Include the session time, the other person’s display name if you have it, and a factual description of what happened. Do not retaliate against someone for making a good-faith report. We may not be able to share full details of another person’s outcome with you, but we take credible reports seriously.

We may investigate reports, review session records, and decide what action is appropriate. Responses can include a warning, required training or profile edits, pausing a listing, cancelling future sessions, suspending or removing marketplace access, withholding or reversing payouts where the Terms allow, refunding a student, and, where required or permitted by law, reporting to an institution or authorities.

We do not have to wait for a criminal or university finding before acting to protect users. Enforcement decisions are made at our discretion, acting reasonably and in line with the Terms. Serious or repeated breaches will usually mean removal.

This Code does not create an employment, partnership, or fiduciary relationship. Tutors remain independent providers. Nothing in this Code limits rights that cannot be excluded under New Zealand law, including under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 where it applies.

We may update this Code as the marketplace grows. The current version is posted on this page with a “Last updated” date. Material changes may also be flagged in the product or by email. Continued use of tutoring after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Code, except where law requires additional consent. Tutors who cannot accept an update should pause their listing and contact us.

Questions or reports: legal@afterhours.study

broke money, afterhours.study and Afterhours

New Zealand