Varsity Tutors

We use the service for my two oldest daughters, the younger one has special needs (ASD), so it’s understandable we’ve had a hard time finding a tutor that fits her needs. We’ve tried again and again, around 10 or so tutors (some good, some bad) and she seems to be getting no benefit from the tutoring. No increase in grades, no retention of learned material, etc. Our oldest daughter graduated and is doing some tutoring herself. So, we no longer find the service useful and we want to move on.

We call to get a refund for our unused hours ($5300+) and are told of this 30 day policy and are not entitled to a refund. If we have auto pay set up every month and we can’t consistently schedule tutors every month, how can this policy possibly be an effective policy? It’s deceitful and completely audacious for this company to somehow believe they’re entitled to keep my money for a prepaid service that has not been provided. The website says 100% satisfaction guarantee. Don’t believe this. The sales people tell you unused hours can be refunded, don’t believe this.

Are we expected to call every 30 days and get a refund for unused hours because y’all can’t find a tutor to come out here? What a ridiculous policy. The sad part is we have 3 younger children and I think the service could be useful for children without special needs, but we won’t be doing business with this deceptive company. We will definitely be using someone else in the future for the rest of our children. As for this issue, my husband and I are irate and our next call will be to our lawyer to resolve this matter.

They made me sign a pretty long online document which states the 30 day clause, which they fail to disclose over the phone when they're eager to get your money. My issue here is that they lied to me over the phone, and that is not correct. They will not honor a verbal agreement, which by the way is recorded by them when you make your payment. I want the money refunded because they were not able to provide the service they promised. I would highly recommend using a different company.

I've been impressed with Varsity. I've read their Yelps and some people are like, "I didn't find anybody for me," but my experience was the opposite. It was like Varsity found someone immediately. The first person they found for ECE probably wasn't totally appropriate. She was not a craftsman and she kinda flaked on us setting up appointments, cancelling, and then saying her computer was broken. I gave her two attempts and then I called Varsity and told them it wasn't working. And within 48 hours, they had Saudrick for us. Also, every time I've given them feedback, they've responded so, I'm pleased.

And then, we were trying to set Will up for Chemistry and Varsity found some excellent people for him but time-wise, it wasn't working for him. And he was finding he could do the chemistry, so far. Still, there was a huge improvement in his learning experience since using a tutor through Varsity. And it spilled over, not just from the ECE but to everything. He had a bad first quarter at college. He ended up with MRSA, which is a bad infection and he was septic. And he didn't tell us. He should have withdrawn for the quarter, which he didn't and did very poorly. And I think it was devastating to him and having Saudrick help him master this ECE turned him around in all of his classes. He ended up with three A's and a B from being on academic probation.

They were also super flexible and accommodating as a company. For example, you sign up for a certain block of hours for tutoring. However, we needed a couple of more hours in addition to the initial block. They broke their normal business model of buying a block of five to just giving us one extra session because that's all we needed. The account managers had the autonomy to execute without going to be bureaucratic and difficult.

In addition, the tutors were talented and professional. They interacted with our daughter in a way that put her at ease, lowered the anxiety and made it as fun as it could be. We really appreciated the tenor of the engagement with the tutors. They were very effective, too. It was a two-hour block where the tutor is working with a 14-year old and they were able to keep her engaged with a smile of her face. Our case was that we decided to look at boarding schools late into my daughter's freshmen year of high school until she didn't have really the runway that most kids do to prepare. We tried to compress a lot in a month or five weeks time. It was amazing that Varsity Tutors was able to help us get there.

As a parent, you want to be able to help your child but you don't necessarily refresh on the thing that they're learning. So, they have the spot tutoring where you can simply open up Varsity Tutors any time of the day or night and an available tutor in that domain will then present themselves on your screen and you buy a block like an hour session.

They also have a fantastic interface and their software is great. You get a visual like face-time ask session with the tutors, so you see them and you're talking to them in one quadrant of the screen, and another quadrant, they're able to put up questions, and in another quadrant, there's a work space where the tutor can visually show the student how to solve the problem. It may not have been the same reaction for my daughter, but it felt like you get to play Jeopardy. It has a little bit of a game show. You do it and see their questions and then you have so much time to solve it. It's fun and it was as painless as it could be.

My daughter is a good student. She was taking board to get into one of the elite boarding schools in the country which is Lawrenceville. It's a number three rank, like one of the most selected boarding schools, 10% admission, and she got in. So, it was mission accomplished from the test perspective. We were really happy. I'm impressed with the company that I would love to be an advocate in any way that I can to help them.

Meanwhile, I had been telling her we needed to do the tutoring more than once a week to get our sessions completed. She said she understood. The ACT arrived and my daughter still had one outstanding session remaining. Since her school was offering an ACT a couple of weeks later, I told the tutor we wanted the last session. That was scheduled with no acknowledgment that she failed to make the required number of sessions before the first ACT! (If I hadn't gone online to check to see if Varsity fulfilled their contractual obligations, I don't think she or Varsity Tutors would have mentioned it!) Then, my daughter got a rather mediocre score on the ACT. Seriously, it was a score she had gotten on her PSAT with no tutoring! Save your money!!!

I signed my daughter up for the high school AP Taxes, which is a hard course. We went through a process with several tutors, and they were good but I was looking for a fit for my daughter. Varsity was patient with me and they probably would have went through more if I needed them to. But they found a really great match for my daughter. And my daughter had one session with this tutor. She liked the tutor but the online thing was not for her, and it may be because she's younger or because of the subject matter. My daughter said there has to be somebody right next to her, which I think she needed for her confidence level, too. And it's hard to convey that over the phone.

We were completely signed up but we didn't end up finishing our sessions. We have already paid but there is a guarantee in 30 days. I called Varsity and I explained what was happening. All I had to pay for was the time that that tutor spent, which was an hour and a half. And then, the rest of my money was refunded. I have planned on quitting because the important thing was for my daughter to get helped for this incredibly challenging class. And then, we ended up finding somebody locally that she could sit down with face to face. But the people at Varsity that I talked with were terrific, and I'm very satisfied. I have Varsity on my radar if we stumble with a different subject again in the future. I'd recommend to people, and I already did to a couple of people.

I was looking to hire an SAT tutor for my daughter. I spoke with the Varsity salesperson and was given all kinds of promises. Because my daughter is a student at a boarding school where the average SAT is 1430, she needed to do exceptionally well to stand out from her peers, especially as most of the kids apply to the same colleges. I explained that she only needed help with Math, but it had to be someone who scored an 800 or very close to that, since her target is 1500. The salesperson assured me he would find the best tutor - one that would be an Ivy League graduate. He said it over and over. Guaranteed it every way he could.

I was obviously too trusting and took him at his word. After taking all my money up front ($900), he then assigned a tutor. Varsity chose an *undergrad* at a regular state school - who wasn't even a math major. This might be ok for many, but the issue I had is that the salesperson outright LIED to me. I had to call and talk to several people (they would not put me through to him), so they assigned another tutor. This time, we got a student who had finished one semester at an Ivy, but was "taking some time off". She wasn't even a sophomore!

Despite the tutor profiles on the Varsity website and the option to request each one directly, that is nothing but false advertising. One of the women at Varsity actually admitted to it. She said to just disregard it! We tried the second tutor because it was obvious we wouldn't get better. Although this person was a math expert, she had poor communication skills so was not very effective. Not only that, it was very difficult to get a hold of her, and then she just ignored my emails. I also found out that the tutor was not familiar with teaching the SAT. She had no idea how many math sections were on the test, how many problems, pacing, etc.

I had to call Varsity again to request a third tutor. They sent me another student from a state school, but at least this one had actually graduated from college. Since the weeks to prep for the test were dwindling, we had to go with this one. He was passable, but failed to adhere to my request that he assign my daughter practice material between the weekly sessions. I told him verbally and via email/text. He was also hard to get a hold of and would not respond to some of my communications.

This pattern persisted over several weeks, but it got worse. He failed to schedule sessions with my daughter even though we had explicitly agreed to a schedule prior to working with him. We stuck with him at that point because we knew we couldn't get better. Although this tutor had actually graduated from college, he was only a few years out so was not a seasoned tutor by any regard. Please note that Varsity was charging $75 per hour for these kids they were sending our way. Oh, they also assigned us a 4th tutor out of the blue. She called and couldn't understand that we already had someone. The straw that broke the camel's back is that the tutor STOOD MY DAUGHTER UP THE NIGHT BEFORE HER SAT. They were supposed to have a final review session. He ignored her calls and texts and mine as well.

If I wasn't so naive and hadn't already paid the $900, I would have fired Varsity before my daughter even started her sessions because of the unethical way they manage their business. Talk about bait and switch! I dearly regret that I didn't pay the extra $20 an hour to work with a company whose tutors are full-time employees who get benefits - meaning accountability. The tutors were also adults with graduate degrees. This was definitely a case of "You get what you pay for." I suffered from hiring Varsity and don't want you to as well. Trust me, it would be a disservice to your child.

She didn’t do great on her SAT and she decided she wanted to take the ACT. For the ACT, the tutor came about maybe six or seven times, either weekly or sometimes we had to skip a little. And communication was a combination of the app, email, phone, and text. She was taught how to crack the test. And her test scores were incredible. And even though she was moving along with the ACT, when she took the SAT again, she said everything she learned on the ACT tutoring was able to transfer. So, she did amazing on both tests.

I've already got two friends who are now using the same tutor from us. I've told other people that they have to use this service, it's the best because there's flexibility and if you don't like the vibe or you're not getting along well with one tutor, they'll give you another one. If you have extra hours left over, you could use it for subject tutoring or for essay writing, and that the cost actually worked out to be better than the local tutors. And you can put it on your credit card. When I first signed up, I used eBay also. I've recommended it multiple times and posted about it too.

The second tutor, Rebekah, is wonderful. She's very bright, creative and as my 11-year old grandson said that she knows how to explain things so a kid can understand. From the minute she walks in the door, she has a really good energy. We have a study here at the house and I hear her and my grandson. She's very up and positive. She is a natural teacher and makes it fun. Every lesson, she writes out what they're doing as they go, and at the end, shows us what they did and the things where he could work on. He just adores her and they have names for each other.

She really gets him and spends way more time than she is supposed to. She'll stay and visit and tell us how it'd go on or whatever she needs to do. As a matter of fact, we just bought 30 more sessions with her. She is teaching him how to learn and to read the questions first when he takes a test over a paragraph. She gives a lot of little tips, like using a straight edge to put under the lines where he's reading, because he has attention deficit and it's really easy for him to lose his place. She just gives him a lot of tips on how to organize his math, how to use extra paper and make it neat. To be able to know how to do it is one thing, but to teach an 11-year old is another. We've had an excellent experience with Varsity Tutors and since we had gotten Rebekah, it had been all-around positive.

I love that it was a one-on-one and I love the online platform where they can do the work on the screen and the tutor can see where he's making his mistake. Prior to Varsity Tutors the highest he had scored on the Math was a 28. He just took the test in April and he got a 31 so his Math score went up three points which is 100% correlated to Varsity Tutors. We had used Huntington before for the same exact ACT Prep. We tried everything, including working on his own and a local tutor, but Varsity Tutors was phenomenal and I will never recommend anything else. I would tell my friends that it is the way to go. Originally, it's gonna be expensive and it is $1,500 but it's not anymore less expensive than with what's out there. We are extremely happy with them.

The process is not just the old-fashioned two plus two equals four. Usually it's modern day like video games. If my son is into Minecraft, the tutor relates that to what he's learning and the fun computer games that are actually teaching him stuff. The tutor also helps with my son's assignments. I'd tell friends to go for Varsity Tutors. I have had nothing but positive experiences.

We had two tutors and we tried one through the online platform. He just graduated from Tulane and he was super nice, personable and was like having a boy band tutor. The platform that they used online was very similar to Skype and it was really easy, so that worked out well. My son graduated and was traveling after graduation. And the Summer course my son was taking ended, so when the school started, I wanted to try the in-person that comes to our home to see if that would make a difference and start the school year with the Math class that he had going into Geometry.

I wanted to see how having someone in our home works and if it was a difference. This tutor has been tutoring for about 20 years. She has six kids and she gets kids. I usually sit down at my computer and I hear them. My son gets her and he'll push her and she pushes back. It's really cute. She's not a mommy but not a scary teacher. She treats him like a high schooler, not a little kid.

It was a good experience and we actually just got our younger son, an 8th grader, put in a high school favorites class this year, and she also did that. No one really complains that it's tutor time. They would rather play the video games but my son goes, "Okay, fine. I'll be right down," which is nice. It's a good thing and it’s cool. I like Varsity Tutors’ professionalism and their fees are fairly comparable to others. Their follow-up is so cool. They are not pushing to make new sales. The teacher has been extremely flexible and the self-flexibility has been really appreciated as well. I would tell others to absolutely try Varsity Tutors because both in-house and online will help the students and they would get the subjects. Varsity Tutors understand and they can help the students learn the way they need to learn.

My son’s grades always soared. It went up a lot of percentage points because his tutoring upfront worked. My son was at a D, it was 69 percent and after the second session, my son was able to reach a test and it went to 76 percent and up from there. That was pretty exceptional. My son always gets someone frustrated but the tutor was extremely patient. I would communicate through text message and Varsity Tutors were really responsive. We really like Jean, the tutor, a lot. My son really liked him. It was more one on one with my son but we have the recordings that they can review. It was really beneficial. For instance, my son would read some of the French items and the tutor would correct him and tell himh how it should be said. And they ended up going over the fundamentals again.

If you need help and you need someone online teaching that is gonna be patient, I would highly recommend Varsity Tutors. Anyone who struggles with ADHD and needs one-on-one teaching, I would highly recommend Varsity Tutors because of the knowledge. I love how you tell them the interest of the person that’s getting tutored and they match him with the tutor that fits. They deal with people that are all over the nation and the world and depending on where their location is, the timing can get messed up sometimes or there isn’t enough connection but they’re very thorough and they work with you at a convenient time.

Well, I do not need any other services. My son has his resume completed and is in the process of being hired. I have no other family members to "gift" these hours to. No one needs to learn a language. This is a lot of money that my son and I need for my medical expenses, household expenses, and even clothing for my son's new career. If they had told me (as I told them that he would be graduating in 2018) that I could not get reimbursed, I would have ordered smaller packages. Not once was this issue brought up when on the phone with the salesman. That I may be in jeopardy of having too many hours that could not be refunded.

I am deeply disappointed that I am losing $400 that I truly need. I am hoping that someone further up the line contacts me and rectifies this situation. If not, be aware of this and do not buy the big packages if you think for one minute you may not be able to use the hours. I asked to be contacted and was told I would be contacted shortly. I was not. I am truly disappointed as I called again to leave another message for resolution to this.

Samantha offered to find me a solution in a week's time after the second fiasco, she came through for me big time. She recommended a French student living in New York. He understood perfectly well what I wanted to accomplish, helped me have confidence when speaking and taught me a lot. I can honestly say I couldn't have been happier with the result. I came back from France a week ago, I was able to communicate with everyone without feeling insecure about my grammar or pronunciation... I met with business partners and visited all the tourist attractions. I am very happy with the outcome, it was money well spent.

My daughter was able to improve her grades and catch up on her assignments. She gained a better understanding of concepts because she had that one-on-one experience. They’re efficient, and their hours are flexible. The tutor I had worked around my daughter’s schedule. For example, we needed more time, so we just added more time. We wanted to also increase how much tutoring she got a week and they accommodated all that. I would highly recommend Varsity Tutors for anyone who’s having trouble. I can only speak about Math though, because that’s what we took, and I’ve seen that it helped my daughter a lot. But I know they do other subjects.

It was easy for me to let my daughter, Katie, deal and schedule with her tutors. I have listened in a couple of times and her tutors were very encouraging. They made her think about things. She's also always so relieved and happy when she gets off the phone with them. Math is her best subject and it's the subject that we needed the tutoring in. The bad part was she had a very difficult cantankerous teacher and it appeared to be that her goal was to make the student fail. So, Katie, would go online and meet with her tutor, then she’d understand everything and have every concept. Her learning skills improved greatly because she knew she was understanding her lessons and her confidence level was good. But the next time she had class, it was like there was nothing she could do that was right even though she knew her lessons.

We had an incident where Katie dropped the class not because of varsity, but because of the teacher. She made it so incredibly difficult for her and the stress level was beyond reality. So, Katie decided to take the class next year. But she didn’t realize and her counselor didn’t advise her that when she did this, Katie became ineligible and in order for her cheer team to be eligible for any of the awards that they'd win or to go to Nationals, Katie had to learn the rest of the semester plus review a whole semester's worth of work in seven days. When I called Varsity Tutors about the whole situation, they said they were on it and they worked with Katie. However much she needed, they were there. And the night before her final exam that she had to take, the second tutor that we had that was out at Colorado Springs told Katie that they'd get on it at 6:30 and she'd stay on with her until she was comfortable and could go take that test.

I've told many of my friends about Varsity Tutors. I told them that if they want the most amazing tutoring experience, they should go with Varsity Tutors. They work with the kids in terms of schedules because most kids have very busy schedules. They also make sure that the kids understand the lessons and if their child is not clicking with one tutor, then they'd find somebody else. The upfront price was a sticker shock, but when you break it down, it's either the same price as or cheaper than meeting with another tutor in person. I've also told my friends about that, too, to prepare them. When you're going to spend $1,000 you need a little preparation. A lot of people have taken Varsity's number from me and either their child went right through it or they did something different, but I know they haven't gone with another tutoring system.

The tutors at Varsity Tutors are all very, very highly qualified. You just have to explain to them the situation you're in and then they match you. We had great success with who they matched us with. They also offer a system for switching if you're not really comfortable with whoever you get matched with and it wouldn't be a criticism of anybody, but we never had a need to use it. They're great about scheduling too. Their scheduling is easier than with an in-person tutor because you can choose the last minute. One week you might not even talk to the tutor and then the next week, you might want three sessions and that usually worked out great. I'd tell my friends not to let the facts online hold them back. They should investigate Varsity Tutors right away because they have people on every subject that are caring and are very capable of helping students raise their grades. It's been a big benefit to our household.