The short answer
Huntington sells blocks of tutoring hours delivered at a center on their schedule. More hours isn't reliably what moves an ACT score, and driving to a location puts a hard ceiling on how often a student can practice. Liv spent about three hours a week and went from a 26 to a 30 in eight weeks, because those three hours were pointed at exactly the right things and happened wherever she was.
Huntington runs a real diagnostic and their centers are well staffed. The gap usually shows up in what happens after the diagnostic.
Hours are the unit, and hours aren’t the constraint
The Huntington model prices in blocks of tutoring hours. That makes buying decisions simple and it makes one assumption: that a student who isn’t improving needs more instruction time.
For a student who’s genuinely behind in a subject, that’s often true. For a student stuck at a 25 on the ACT, it usually isn’t. They’re generally not short on hours. They’re short on knowing which handful of question types to spend those hours on.
Adding hours to an untargeted plan mostly adds hours.
The location cost is bigger than it looks
A center-based program means driving there, which means it happens twice a week at most, on the center’s calendar. Between those visits the student is on their own with no plan and nobody checking.
Score movement comes from short, frequent, specific repetition. Twice a week in a building is a hard cap on frequency, and it’s a cap that has nothing to do with how well the sessions themselves go.
Three hours a week, four points
Liv was spending 20 to 25 hours a week on marching band. She had about three hours for the ACT and pretending otherwise would have collapsed the plan.
Her coach started with Reading, her easiest available points, and got her to a 33 there before touching anything harder. Then Reading came off the plan entirely and everything moved to Math and English for the October test.
Eight weeks, roughly three hours a week, 26 to 30, and a $140,000 scholarship at Franklin & Marshall.
That’s the argument against buying hours. Liv bought fewer hours than almost anyone and got four points, because the hours were aimed.
What to look at before your next purchase
Ask what specifically will be worked on in week one, and why that and not something else. If the answer is a general program rather than a named set of question types drawn from your student’s own test, more hours will produce more of what you’ve already seen.
This question comes up most often when families are comparing us with Huntington Learning Center. See the full side-by-side →
