The problem
Tutors make a lot of their own material: a set of questions for exactly the gap a student has. At 3 hours a week of preparation, that's about 13 hours a month, much of it typing out variations of the same kind of question.
What the AI does
Paste the topic, the exam board and level, and the kind of mistake your student keeps making into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Ask for 10 questions that get harder, with worked answers and a common-error note for each. Then work every answer yourself before using it: assistants make arithmetic and science errors and sometimes set questions outside the specification. Never paste a student's name, work or school into a consumer assistant, and don't paste whole past papers; write your own questions in the style of the specification.
A worked example
A self-employed GCSE maths tutor in Exeter spends about 3 hours a week writing practice sets for 25 students.
Before
3 hours a week writing practice sets: about 12.9 hours a month
After
2 hours a week drafting with an assistant and checking every answer: about 8.6 hours a month
What it's worth
About $172£129€154A$248C$243 a month of time saved. That's 1 hour a week x 4.3, 4.3 hours, at an assumed $40£30€36A$58C$56 an hour. Free plans can do this job; a paid plan is about $20£15€18A$29C$28 to $27£20€24A$38C$38 a month for one person if you hit the free limits.
How to set it up
- Write a short prompt you can reuse: exam board, level, topic, the student's specific gap, number of questions and 'include worked answers'.
- Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with no student names or work.
- Work every answer yourself and correct or delete any that are wrong or off the specification.
- Save the checked set in your own resource folder so you build a bank over time.
- Note which prompts gave the best results and reuse them.
What goes wrong
- Assistants get maths and science answers wrong with confidence. An unchecked wrong answer teaches the wrong method.
- Never paste a child's name, work, grades or school into a consumer assistant.
- Exam boards own their past papers; don't paste them in wholesale or pass off generated copies as real papers.