Methodology

How we calculate 3–5× faster.

Children master math skills 3 to 5 times faster with Level Up than with traditional tutoring. A skill that started as a gap takes under 20 minutes of practice to master in Level Up, on average. The same result takes a tutor a 60 to 90 minute session. We base this on published tutoring research and on practice data from children using Level Up.

It also costs far less. A month of Level Up costs about what one hour of tutoring does, which for a child who is a year behind can mean thousands of dollars saved.

Try the calculatorRead how we got the numbers
Practice time to master one gap skill

Minutes of practice for a child to master one skill that started as a gap.

Level Up18.8 min on average
under 20 min
A tutorone session, one skill
60 to 90 min

Level Up: active practice per gap skill mastered, every child weighted equally, from our usage data. Tutor: a structured session runs 60 to 90 minutes and teaches about one skill, from published tutoring research.

Proficiency calculator

How long would it take your child to become proficient?

Answer three questions about your child. The estimate, the practice hours and the cost comparison update as you go.

Your child today
How is math going?
Your read from homework, tests and what the teacher says.
How much of 4th grade still causes trouble?
Topics from 4th grade that keep coming back.
Do you have a recent test score?
Optional. A score makes this much more accurate than a guess.
Time to reach proficiency
About 4 to 5 months
to reach what NAEP calls Proficient: competency over challenging material, applied to real situations. Only roughly 36 in 100 5th graders get there.
220 to 300
skills to bring to proficiency
37 to 51
hours of focused practice
Path to becoming proficient
Level Up$1964.5 months, on the 6-month plan
A tutor, twice a week$6,50015 months, 130 sessions at $50
10 months and $6,304 saved
A child at this level reaches proficiency 10 months sooner with Level Up than with a tutor, for about $6,304 less.
Assumes 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. The assessment and the report happen inside the free trial.

For a typical 5th grader who is about a year behind, with a handful of topics from 4th grade still causing trouble, we estimate 220 to 300 skills to bring to proficiency. That is about 37 to 51 hours of focused practice: around 4.5 months and $196 with Level Up, compared with around 15 months, 130 sessions and $6,500 with a tutor. Level Up saves $6,304 and reaches proficiency 10 months sooner.

The tutor comparison assumes 2 sessions a week at $50 each, with each session bringing about 2 skills to proficiency.

The working

How we got these numbers.

Seven short steps, from what a gap is to what a tutoring session gets done, and then the calculation in one line. Every number on the page says which bar it is on.

01

What a gap is

A gap is a skill from an earlier grade that your child cannot do yet. The count of those is the number the calculator shows.

2,114specific skills tracked from kindergarten through 8th grade, each with a live estimate of whether your child can do it right now.
3 gradesbelow the current one are assessed, because that is where a foundation either holds or does not. A 5th grader is assessed on 4th, 3rd and 2nd grade skills.
70%is the proficient line. Every prior-grade skill that sits under it counts as a gap.

A skill is small and concrete. A few from the middle grades:

multiplying multi-digit numberscomparing fractionscalculating a unit rateadding fractions with unlike denominatorssolving a two-step equation
How we counted

For the pace analysis we included only skills that began as a gap before practice started. Skills the child already appeared to know, where practice was mostly confirming it, were left out. Confirming something a child already knows is much faster than learning something missing, and counting it would make our number look better than it is.

02

Two finish lines, and how long each takes

Proficient means your child can do it. Mastered means your child has proven it. The calculator plans to proficient; the 3 to 5 times claim is measured to mastery.

Level Up marks two points on the way to knowing a skill, and the difference matters for reading this page.

0%Estimate that the next question is answered correctly100%
Proficientcrosses 70%

Your child can do it. The program’s estimate that a question on that skill will be answered correctly has crossed 70 percent. This is the line the calculator plans to, because it is the point where the foundation holds and the next grade’s work stops being a struggle.

Masteredcrosses 95%

Your child has proven it. The estimate has crossed 95 percent, and the program has seen enough evidence to trust it: at least five attempts, correct answers on the hardest problems, and a confidence level that rules out a lucky run. Completing a lesson is not enough, and mastery is not permanent. Material comes back through review, and a skill that has gone soft is brought back for reinforcement.

We measured active practice time to both lines. Idle time and time away from the screen are not counted. Across the gap skills in our usage data:

10.2 minPer gap skill brought to proficient, measured end to end.
16.6 minAverage active practice per gap skill mastered.
9.5 minMedian active practice per gap skill mastered.
18.8 minPer mastered gap skill, giving every child equal weight. The figure we publish from.

Because some children practiced far more than others, we also computed the mastery figure giving every child equal weight, so the most active students do not dominate the average. That more conservative calculation gives 18.8 minutes, and it is the one behind the 3 to 5 times claim. Rounded, a gap skill reaches mastery in under 20 minutes of active practice on average, and proficiency in about 10.

The 10.2 minute figure comes from more than 10,000 active minutes of practice and more than 1,000 gap skills brought to proficient. It counts every active minute a child spent, divided by every gap skill that crossed the line, including skills that were never practiced on their own. Proving a harder skill is evidence for the easier ones underneath it, and the program credits those rather than drilling what has already been shown. That is part of why the number is low, and it is the number the calculator uses.

03

What a tutoring session gets done

About one skill. Two independent sources point to that number: how sessions are designed, and what they have been measured to achieve.

A tutoring session teaches about one skill.

How a session is designed

The Texas Education Agency’s High-Impact Tutoring Toolkit, based on the National Student Support Accelerator model, builds each session around one learning objective: review, explanation, guided practice, independent work, then a check of whether the student got there. One objective, such as comparing fractions or solving a two-step equation, is the size of one Level Up skill.

Sessions run 60 to 90 minutes. Varsity Tutors, for example, requires at least 60 minutes through 5th grade and 90 minutes from 6th grade up.

One objective per session is one skill per session.

What sessions have been measured to achieve

Saga Education runs the best-tested tutoring program we know of, with two randomized trials in Chicago public high schools.

  • A tutoring session every school day for a year, about 180 sessions.
  • Math scores rose by about two thirds of a school year, measured against how much children in 3rd to 8th grade gain in a year.
  • A school year in those grades is about 275 Level Up skills, so that is about 170 skills.
170 skills ÷ 180 tutoring sessionsAbout 1 skill per tutoring session
To be safe

We recognize that skills come in different sizes, and that some tutors and tutoring programs do better than this. So the calculator on this page credits the tutor with 2 skills per session, double what the evidence suggests.

04

The calculation

Under 20 minutes against 60 to 90. That is 3 to 5 times faster, and the calculator is more cautious still.

Level Up is 3 to 5 times faster than traditional tutoring.

Level UpUnder 20 minutes per skillof practice for a child to master a skill that started as a gap, and about 10 minutes to become proficient in it.
versus
Traditional tutoring60 to 90 minutes per skillbecause a tutoring session teaches about one skill.

A tutor needs a 60 to 90 minute session to teach one skill. A child in Level Up masters a skill that started as a gap in 18.8 minutes of practice on average, which is 3 to 5 times faster. It also costs far less: a month of Level Up costs about what one hour of tutoring does.

The calculator at the top of this page is more cautious. It gives the tutor 2 skills per session, not one, which makes Level Up about 3 times faster.

05

Why the Level Up program can move faster

Not by rushing children through math. By making the practice time count.

The advantage does not come from rushing children through math. It comes from making the practice time count. A tutor has to fit diagnosis, explanation, guided practice, independent work and feedback into the hour. The Level Up program does the diagnosis and the sequencing continuously.

01

Finds the gaps

It keeps track of what has been demonstrated, so practice goes to what is missing, not to skills that are already solid.

02

Follows the prerequisite links

It chooses what to work on next from the links between skills. No whole lesson is repeated because one prerequisite was missing.

03

Moves on as soon as a skill is shown

There is no class pace to keep up with. A child spends most of the time working directly on what is missing.

06

A month of personalized math practice for the cost of one tutoring hour

$49 a month buys about 10 hours of adaptive practice. $50 buys about one hour with a tutor.

The difference is not only speed. It is also how much individual attention a family can buy for the same money. Level Up costs $49 a month. Private tutoring in the United States commonly runs $25 to $80 an hour, according to Tutors.com, so a month of Level Up costs about what one hour of private math tutoring does. If you are weighing a learning center instead, here is what Kumon and Mathnasium cost.

Private tutoringabout $50
about 1 hour
Level Up$49 a month
about 10 hours of personalized practice

A child using the program as intended, 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, gets around 10 hours of personalized math practice a month. Those are not ten hours of generic worksheets. The program adapts them to your child as it goes, finding gaps, choosing skills, adjusting what comes next and moving on as each one is shown.

About 30gap skills brought to mastery in a month of practice, at the rates measured above.
50+gap skills brought to proficiency in the same month.

Over a school year, Level Up covers more than twice as much. A school year of math is about 275 skills (4th grade), taught over 9 months. Tutoring three times a week, the dose the research supports, is about 108 sessions in 36 weeks, at about one skill per session. A child on Level Up, 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, masters about 258 skills in the same 36 weeks.

Tutoringthree sessions a week
about 3½ months of learning
Level Up30 minutes a day, 5 days a week
about 8 months of learning
108 skills ÷ 275 × 9 months · 258 skills ÷ 275 × 9 months, both rounded downAbout 8 months of learning a year with Level Up, against about 3½ with tutoring
07

What proficient means outside Level Up

The reference point is NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Only roughly 36 in 100

5th graders reach what NAEP calls Proficient in math: competency over challenging subject matter, applied to real-world situations.

NAEP describes its Proficient level as solid academic performance: competency over challenging subject matter, applied to real-world situations, with the analytical skills appropriate to the grade. That is what a Level Up skill asks for too. The program will not mark a skill mastered without correct work on its hardest problems, and the problems are applied rather than procedural. A child who has closed every gap below the current grade is standing on a complete foundation, which is the thing NAEP Proficient describes.

We update this analysis as more student learning data becomes available. The mastery figures were last recomputed in August 2026 and the proficiency figures in September 2026. External sources: the Texas Education Agency High-Impact Tutoring Toolkit, the National Student Support Accelerator, published Varsity Tutors session minimums, Tutors.com math tutor prices, the Saga Education trials in Guryan and colleagues, Not Too Late, annual test-score gains by grade from Bloom, Hill, Black and Lipsey, NAEP 2024 mathematics results and the NWEA 2025 MAP Growth norms.

08 · The calculation in one line

Under 20 minutes, against 60 to 90.

Level UpUnder 20 minutesof active practice to master a skill that started as a gap, on average.
versus
Traditional tutoring60–90 minutesfor a structured session built around one principal learning objective.

Approximately 3–5× the learning pace. And at $49 a month, a child using the program as intended gets roughly 10 hours of personalized math practice for about the cost of one traditional tutoring hour.

That is what we mean when we say: master math skills 3–5× faster than traditional tutoring.

See where your child actually stands.

The assessment and the report happen inside your free trial. Seven days free, then $49 a month. Cancel any time during the trial and you are not charged.

Read a sample report