UO Second Age

I'm trying to raise my new characters fencing and tactics by sparring my other dexxer who is GM fencing and tactics but both skills are raising very slow. They have been at it for around 3 hours now with only a couple points gained, is this working as intended? I remember doing this on OSI servers and the gains were fairly quick. My new dexxer started at28 fencing, 30 tactics.

Combat skills see better gains with tamed beasts, or hired npcs for macroing not with other player created characters.