I've made this comment in Slack before when people have wondered/worried about Not Helpful ratings, but I think it's possible learners sometimes give a Not Helpful rating not to critique the tutor but to convey "this is not the tutor that helped me." Often in Live Help requests you may get multiple people commenting "I can help!" and sometimes only one tutor gets to follow through with the learner and provide full assistance. Then when a learner is given multiple names of tutors to provide feedback on, they might simply mark Not Helpful for any tutor who wasn't the one that actually provided the assistance. And they may think they are filling out the form accurately and honestly and not critiquing the tutor in any way. Certainly Not Helpful can actually mean "I found this tutor to be unhelpful, they tried to help but it did not help me at all." but I think in plenty of situations it does not mean that.

While I like the idea of allowing learners the opportunity to provide constructive criticism to a tutor, I would advocate for the removal of the Not Helpful functionality entirely given how much discussion comes up in Slack of people thinking they received this rating unfairly or worried it'll hurt their standing in Schoolhouse. I would rather just see a free-form text area where learners can provide textual feedback to tutors without a Not Helpful label associated to it (and if learners are downright mean in feedback the learners potentially get removed from the platform). Then tutors can still receive the (hopefully) constructive feedback from learners without being worried about the number of Not Helpfuls they've received.

Good idea! There’s already another idea like this, and I agree. There often no explanation for a not helpful rating, and it sort of takes away from the point of constructive criticism if you can’t know what you did wrong.