Does $30 an hour sound reasonable for MCAT, SAT/ACT, and any other college and high school subjects, assuming that I met your requirements for experience/high scores/good references? That's about what I'm thinking of charging, realizing that I have to spend time outside of the tutoring sessions prepping what we're going to cover.
The last time I checked, private tutoring packages from Kaplan or PR cost over $100/hour and people have to sign up for 10 to 20-something total hours. They have clearly set the bar high in terms of price. If you charge only $30/hour, that seems like a good price.
However, as people have said before, it comes down to whether or not it's helpful. The important thing when tutoring is to give such a high quality review, that people keep coming back. I used to tutor privately for final exams and MCAT. I charged $25-$30 an hour, depending on how much work it was to deal with a particular student. (I basically tutored until I discoved I could get paid more per hour by a prep course.)
Two things I discoved that really helped is that (1) I'd always ask the tutee to send me an email with a list of what topics they needed, so I could go in fully prepared. (2) Before we'd meet, I'd write ten mulitple choice questions for each topic (usually two topics total) they wanted to review. Whenever the moment was right, I'd have them do some of the questions. While they were taking those questions, I'd write three or four more on the material we had just gone over, so that they'd have something to try later, to make sure it stuck. My tutees kept coming back on a regular basis, because they liked the fact that I had questions to work from. I used to keep a really good file of those questions, but once I started teaching for BR, I used their question bank instead.
If you plan to tutor for a while, then keep your questions organized. So that you can modify them and use them again.
