How We Run EquateIt on ClassQuill — and Why We Built It That Way

What software does EquateIt actually run on?

EquateIt runs day to day on ClassQuill, the tutoring management platform we built ourselves after none of the existing options actually fit how a tutoring business runs. It handles booking and scheduling, live sessions with a shared whiteboard, homework and auto-marking, invoicing and tutor pay, and the AI features this post is mostly about. Parents, students and tutors all work inside the same system, instead of five different apps stitched together with text messages.

Yes, I’m the founder of EquateIt, and I’m also the person who built ClassQuill. That’s not a conflict I’m going to bury in the fine print. It’s the reason this post exists.

We didn’t licence a platform we’ve never used and hope it holds up. We use it on real students every day, and we’ve spent the last two years finding out where it breaks so we can fix it before anyone else notices.

Why didn’t we just use existing tutoring software?

Before ClassQuill, running EquateIt looked like most independent tutoring operations still look today: Zoom for the actual session, WhatsApp for scheduling and questions, bank transfer for payments (and then chasing them), Google Drive for resources, and a spreadsheet trying to hold together what each student actually needed to work on. Six tools. Zero integration. And a student’s experience was split across all of them: they were texting a tutor on one app, paying on another, and losing worksheets somewhere in a shared Drive folder.

The real cost wasn’t the $20 a month across five subscriptions. It was that nobody, tutor or founder, had a single place to see how a student was actually progressing. A tutor could tell you a student “seemed to be going okay.” They couldn’t show you which topics were weak, whether that had changed since last month, or what the student had actually attempted between sessions.

So we built ClassQuill instead of accepting the workarounds. I’ll be honest about what that meant: building tutoring management software at the same time as running a tutoring company is a lot. There were months where the easier choice would have been to buy an off-the-shelf tool and move on. We didn’t, because every option we tried was built for generic scheduling, not for the actual problem: knowing what a specific student needs to work on next, and giving a tutor the tools to act on it inside the session, not after.

What does a session actually look like on ClassQuill?

A typical EquateIt session happens entirely inside ClassQuill: video call, shared whiteboard, and a live tutor copilot panel, all in the same window. The tutor and student draw and solve problems together on the whiteboard in real time. Alongside it, the tutor has a floating tutor copilot toolbar that reads the live session transcript and suggests a move: ask a question here rather than explain, offer a hint instead of the answer, or pull a similar practice question from the bank mid-session if the student needs another rep on the same idea before moving on.

None of this replaces the tutor. The tutor is still making every call. What it removes is the moment where a tutor, mid-session, has no easy way to pull up a similar question or decide whether to explain or ask, and defaults to whichever is faster. After the session, ClassQuill generates a short lesson summary automatically, covering what was worked on and what to follow up on, so a parent isn’t relying on a one-line text update.

One example that’s stuck with me: a tutor was working with a student who couldn’t get their head around why multiplying two negative numbers gives a positive. The tutor had one way of explaining it, and it wasn’t landing. The copilot suggested a different way to visualise it, mid-session, with the correct reasoning attached — and the student got it on the next attempt. That’s the pattern in miniature: the tutor didn’t need to be taught the concept differently, they needed a second way to explain it, on demand, in the moment it actually mattered.

What does the research say about AI-assisted tutoring?

We didn’t invent this from a hunch. A Stanford randomised controlled trial ran 900 tutors and 1,800 students through live sessions, half with a real-time AI sidebar suggesting moves and half without. Tutors with the sidebar lifted student mastery by 4 percentage points on average, and by 9 percentage points for the tutors who started out least effective, at a cost of roughly $20 per tutor per year. Separately, McGill researchers found that practice questions generated without a targeted cognitive-depth level cluster around the easy end, while questions generated against an explicit depth target and the real curriculum content came out both more accurate and more varied.

We’ve written the full breakdown of both studies, including exactly what they tested and what it means for how a tutor should run a session, in the research behind ClassQuill. The short version: the gain doesn’t come from AI doing the tutoring. It comes from a tutor getting a better prompt at the moment that matters, and from practice questions that are actually calibrated to what VCE exams test, not just “more questions like the last one.”

How does this change what our tutors actually do in sessions?

Before ClassQuill, a tutor’s sense of a student’s weak spots came from memory: what they remembered covering last time, and what felt shaky in the room. Now a tutor opens a session already knowing, from the research the platform is built on, which topics that student is weak on, how that’s shifted since the last session, and what they attempted on their own in between. That’s the difference between guessing where to start and starting exactly where the gaps are.

The same shift shows up after the session. Homework isn’t the next page of the textbook. ClassQuill’s auto-marker grades what the student submits, flags the specific step where it went wrong, and recommends the next set of practice questions targeted at that gap. A tutor can accept it, tweak it, or build their own from the question bank, but they’re not starting from a blank page every week.

The clearest place to point to is scheduling and rescheduling. Before ClassQuill, finding a new time with a parent meant emailing back and forth — checking availability, proposing options, confirming — and I was doing that daily, one parent at a time. Now it’s closer to once a week. That alone cut the time I spend on scheduling by roughly 40%.

What does this mean if your child tutors with EquateIt?

It means sessions are logged, not remembered. It means a tutor can show you, not just tell you, what your child has actually mastered and where they’re still stuck, because the platform tracks it across every session, not just the last one. It means homework is generated from your child’s real gaps rather than the next chapter in a workbook. None of that is a marketing claim; it’s what the system does by default, every session, for every student.

If you want to see what that looks like for your own child, you can browse our tutors or get a quote to start.

A note for tutoring business owners. If you run a tutoring company yourself and you’re reading this wondering what the platform behind it actually is: we built ClassQuill for ourselves first, and other tutoring businesses use it too. It’s not a side project we’re trying to sell you; it’s the same system EquateIt runs on every day. If you’re curious, see how it works.