Three a.m. calls from students freaking because they cannot remember the formula to compute their GPA. Hospital visits to a victim of appendicitis. Yet another phone call from one who forgot her purse at a bar, and it's dawn, and she doesn't have her ID, and she's got a test in two hours for which she needs to show that ID, and she just hasn't a clue whom to call or what to do.

Sounds like a job for mother or at the least housemother. But these calls to heroism were all fielded by the staff at House of Tutors. In addition to providing tutorials and test prep courses, HoT also, it would seem, provides some much-needed balance and focus in campus life. Anjum Malik and her husband, Hussain, both natives of India, run the business as a sort of parental stand-in and are proud of the personal relationships they feel their staff has developed with the students since 1982, when the Maliks bought the two-year-old business.

One of the most important services HoT offers is the Mentor Program for the University's summer provisional students. The school's program offers students who didn't get accepted a chance to come to Austin and earn their way in by achieving a 2.25 GPA without an F in any of four classes.

Judy Walker, vice president at House of Tutors, says of these provisional students, "They're straight out of high school. They haven't had a break, and they're being asked to demonstrate a high level of discipline and maturity when it's their first time away from home. So they come to Austin, and they go a little crazy. It's our job to keep them disciplined and focused." It seems to be working. Each summer the University accepts about 50 percent of the provisional students; Malik and Walker don't let an opportunity pass to mention HoT's significantly higher acceptance rate.

The program's students attend University-prescribed courses from 8 to 4 and then motor on over to 24th and Pearl for another hour or two with their tutor, with an additional review on the weekend. This can be a lot to handle for students who haven't had the chance to spend June out at the lake, work their summer job at the Gap, and just take time to appreciate the end of high school. "Their motivation wanes at the halfway point, when it seems like it's never going to end," says Walker. "But that's why we're here. We know they can do it. We've seen it happen. Our success rate averages 80 percent, when the University usually accepts 50 or 55 percent of all provisional students each summer. We know that our program works."

House of Tutors offers a variety of services with about 150 tutors on call -- mostly upper-division undergrad and grad students with the occasional high school teacher or associate professor added to the mix. They also give an incentive that no university can afford to offer: a guaranteed B or your money back. The deal is for a weekly hour-and-a half tutoring session in addition to the student's regularly scheduled class and costs $250, which compares favorably to the normal $27 hourly rate. "It's not like we're just giving it to them," explains Walker. "They have to attend all their sessions and can't miss their University classes and so on. But we guarantee that if they do all their stuff, and we do our stuff, they'll get (at least) a B."

Proving what the nightly news has been saying for years, most of the tutorial requests are for standard math and science classes. But House of Tutors offers tutorials for just about every University class. And surprisingly, Texas high schools apparently are coming up short in the teaching of rhetoric. "People don't know how to construct a paper," says an exasperated Walker, "so we offer help on the construction and organization of a paper, minor proofing -- things of that nature."

But in the end, "being there" for the students and parents seems to concern Malik the most. "We get calls from the parents saying, 'Oh, please talk to my child. She needs help.' And then the students turn around and ask, 'Will you please call my mother? She's getting very nervous.' We get calls at all times, and I think that's what serves us best. The fact that we're available literally around the clock."

When asked if Malik or Walker do any of the actual tutoring, Judy Walker makes reference to her much-cried-on shoulder, "Oh no, we're here with the Kleenex."

Peter Partheymuller
TEXAS ALCALDE, March/April 1999