How tutor vetting actually works
Listing a Marketplace session requires an Apex plan — the real gate on who can sell at all. From there, a listing whose title or category matches a skill the seller has already scored 70%+ on gets a real Verified Mastery badge, computed straight from their own quiz history, not a separate application process. This post walks through every layer of that system, in the order a tutor actually passes through them.
Gate one: the Apex plan requirement
Before anything else, selling on the Marketplace at all requires being on the Apex subscription tier. That's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight — it means every seller has already committed to the platform at its highest paid tier before they're able to list, which filters out a meaningful amount of low-effort or drive-by listing activity before any content-based check even runs.
Gate two: Verified Mastery, computed automatically
Once a seller can list, whether that listing shows a Verified Mastery badge is computed, not applied for. If a listing's category or title matches a skill the seller's own quiz history already scores at 70% or higher, the badge attaches automatically. There's no moderator reviewing mastery badges one by one — the same graded data that produces a learner's mastery score elsewhere on the platform is the entire input here, which means the badge can't be gamed by writing a more convincing listing description; it's gated on actual quiz performance in that specific skill.
Gate three: Content Vetted, a separate and stricter check
Distinct from Verified Mastery, a tutor can submit lecture materials or other content for a real Copyscape originality scan through the vetting-submission flow. A submission that scores 85 or higher unlocks a Content Vetted badge, shown publicly on the tutor's profile — a stricter, content-specific signal about originality that a mastery score alone doesn't cover, since mastery measures what a tutor knows, not whether the material they've written is their own.
Gate four: ongoing public ratings
Both badges are earned once and then stand until something changes them, but ratings are continuous. Every Marketplace listing accumulates real public student ratings over time, which is the mechanism that catches quality drift a one-time badge can't: a tutor who was genuinely skilled when they scored 70%+ but whose actual teaching or delivery is poor still gets caught by declining ratings, even with a Verified Mastery badge still attached.
Gate five: on-chain credentials, and what "revocable" actually means in practice
The most durable layer sits on-chain — real credentials minted at 70%+ mastery, recorded outside the platform's own database. Durable doesn't mean immutable in the sense of being beyond correction, though: if fraud is confirmed after a credential has already been issued, it's marked revoked rather than silently removed, so the public record shows both that the credential existed and that it was later pulled. That combination — real and durable, but not irreversible — is what makes the credential trustworthy in both directions: trustworthy when it's valid, and honestly labeled when it turns out not to have been.
What "fraud confirmed" actually triggers
When fraud is confirmed on a tutor — whether that's discovered through a moderation review, a dispute, or a pattern of ratings and reports — the response isn't limited to a warning. Revocation on any on-chain credentials tied to the fraud is real and permanent-on-the-record, the Content Vetted and Verified Mastery signals tied to the affected listings stop being shown, and the listing itself moves through the same moderation queue used for other trust-and-safety actions. None of these layers is presented as fraud-proof on its own — the point of stacking five of them, from a plan-tier gate all the way to a revocable on-chain record, is that no single layer has to be perfect for the system as a whole to catch most bad actors.