Getting Extra Help in College with UCF Tutoring from CramBetter

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Last Updated on April 2, 2025 by Tracy

Struggling with tough college courses? Discover how CramBetter’s UCF tutoring services helped my son navigate challenging math and science classes with 24/7 support, expert guidance, and easy-to-understand study resources.

My son has always done great in school. He took honors classes in high school and graduated in the top 10% of his class with a GPA of over 4.0, and yet when he got to college, like most students, he definitely experienced a shift in difficulty level.

Part of that shift, of course, was due to the fact that he’s majoring in mechanical engineering, so his schedule includes challenging classes like physics with calculus. Another part of what made the academic transition from high school to college more difficult was that he chose to go to a large state university, so the class sizes were shockingly massive (think 200+ students in an auditorium and even standing room only in some classes).

It can be confusing on where to go for help with tutoring as a freshman, or even a sophomore! Does your student ask the professor? That can be intimidating when there are 200+ students in the class. Do they ask other classmates? That also can be intimidating if they don’t know them well. Do they ask their advisor? Sure. In fact, you can tell your child to do all those things, but if they do it is a whole other game. I actually ended up asking in the UCF Parents group what other parents recommended when their child needed a some help in some of these crazy math classes and that’s how I heard about CramBetter. It’s actually a 24/7 online tutoring service that specifically provides UCF tutoring for math and science classes, plus they even support for other universities as well.

What is CramBetter?

There’s a lot we like about CramBetter. One of the main benefits is that everything my son’s professor covers in a week’s worth of lectures is condensed down into about a one-hour explanation that’s in plain English, not stuffy, academic lingo.

We were also drawn to the fact that CramBetter is available 24/7, which means if my son doesn’t understand something in class or wants to go into lecture with a bit more background information, he can review the material on his own schedule.

What has worked really well for my son is to log into CramBetter, print the study guides on the topics he’s learned in class over the past week, and fill them out as he watches the explanations. Whenever he feels that he needs more practice or wants to test himself before an exam, he’ll work through CramBetter’s practice exam questions and video solutions. He always tries the questions on his own first, then he checks out the answer key, and if he didn’t get one right, he watches a step-by-step solution video. The few times he’s been confused about something, he’s messaged his tutors and gotten a response right away.

CramBetter honestly saved my son time studying by condensing his classes down into only what he really needed to know for his tests. And because CramBetter is focused on improving conceptual understanding (despite what its name implies), my son felt like he could better understand the lecture and study more effectively.

Why is CramBetter needed?

Being “lost in lecture” is a really common experience at larger schools.

The tutors at CramBetter are lifelong educators with a master’s degree or higher in their fields and a minimum 8 years of teaching experience. In short, they’re people who are good at teaching and actually like doing it.

He did find a Teacher’s Assistant offering studying sessions for one of his classes and that has helped, the tricky thing is that he has to go during specific times and sometimes those times don’t work with his schedule.

We also did private tutoring, where someone could sit down with our son one-on-one, but it’s quite expensive (anywhere from $40 – $200 per hour for someone qualified), and honestly, he didn’t get too much out of that.

With CramBetter, you get professional tutoring on your own schedule for a flat membership fee of $40 per month.

How does CramBetter help students?

I think my son probably used CramBetter the way most students should in that he kept up with it week to week throughout last semester. He used CramBetter for Physics 1 with calculus as well as for Calculus 1, and I think that good foundation is what’s helped him be able to manage Calculus 2 on his own this semester. I’m sure we’ll be back for Physics 2 though.

The program’s structure really helped him stick to a study schedule, which in turn helped him stay on top of what was going on in class. And the explanations were so straightforward, I think I even picked up some calculus along the way (just don’t ask me to solve any problems, haha).

CramBetter focuses on simplifying the most difficult math and science classes that engineering students (like my son) and pre-meds encounter. A lot of these classes, like physics, are actually designed to be so difficult that they make students question their majors, often switching out of STEM fields entirely. It’s sad that what most students really need is a little extra support rather than a complete change of their life plans. I’m just glad we found CramBetter when we did because my son definitely needed some UCF math tutoring at the time, and it really did the trick.

While CramBetter started out with UCF tutoring, they’ve actually expanded to a ton of schools like USF, FSU, and even more outside of Florida, so I’m hoping that sharing our experience will lead to more students everywhere sticking it out through their challenging semesters in college like my son has.

I am all for finding resources that help him keep his Bright Futures scholarship 😉