Website Lets You Bet On Your Grades

crimeandpunishment writes "College students who expect to get good grades can get a good payoff, if they're willing to put their money where their mouse is. A website is taking wagers on grades from students at 36 American colleges. Students have to register, upload their schedule, and give the site access to official school records. The site, called Ultrinsic, then calculates odds and the students decide whether to place their bets. Ultrinsic's CEO Steven Woldf insists it's not online gambling, since these wagers involve skill. He says 'The students have 100 percent control over it, over how they do. Other people's stuff you bet on — your own stuff you invest in.'"

Good idea or bad idea...

[euphemistic]

On one hand this feels wrong, on the other I think I would have got a motivation boost back in university if this were around then. I also kind of like the idea for potentially rewarding students for pushing themselves academically. I'm torn.

Smart

[pwnies]

If the "grade insurance" option isn't used much, it looks like a good way to get college kids to work. Direct monetary benefit was one of the reasons my GPA shot up my Junior and Senior year (I had a job that payed me more for better grades).

21

[cosm]

Game the system. If there are not betting limits, heres what you do.

1. Attend college on list for a few semesters, fail most classes, but not enough to get kicked out.
2. Bet double your accumulated tuition cost, and then overload on your mickey mouse degree classes.
3. No xxxxxxxx step, just straight profit

some people don't have the cash for degrees or don

[Joe The Dragon]

some people don't have the cash for degrees or don't want the loans.

how about people who went to tech schools / on line?

room and board is like $8000-$10000 a year now at some places.

so what about people who did the job and did not go to big 4 year school? Why should they get passed over for a JOB?

Re:Skill?

[chaboud]

I think what he's saying (or at least what I'm saying now) is that you don't necessarily have to have met a very high standard to receive a degree from a number of programs. Similarly, those without degrees can, in fact, be hot shit.

The absolute best and brightest programmers I've worked with have been decorated as follows:

- GED, dropped out of college.
- Almost finished college.
- BS Math.
- BA Music.
- PhD Econ, PhD Physics.

That's from brightest down. That's right, the most rock-star coder (and Director/VP/CTO) that I've worked with was a double drop-out. The standard deviation, in my experience, is pretty large. You'll note that there are no CS, EE, or ECE folks on that list (but a few on my top 10). The programmers that I've seen truly excel after CS programs were the sort that I think would have been pretty darn good with or without the formal education.

Re:some people don't have the cash for degrees or

[Cruciform]

Around 1997 a friend asked me to install Windows95 on his girlfriend's computer for her. I thought this was an odd request, since she had graduated from Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario that week...
I thought that was nuts. And then during the Y2K upgrade boom, I was asked to install a bunch of new machines for 15 (newly graduated, but from where I don't know) programmers hired to work at a government office. I was asked to set up the development environment as well because - wait for it - none of them knew how to install any of the tools. None of them! WTF?!
It boggled my mind that people who have no idea how to use a computer were getting degrees in computer science.

Re:some people don't have the cash for degrees or

[inthealpine]

When most of my friends and myself graduated from college we found to just forget 95% of what we learned in collage and start learning reality at our new jobs. I think that half the collage students career paths would be better served if the students were an apprentice for a year or two. You might even get paid to do it, while learning real job skills. Not to mention that not having collage loans that haunt you for most of your life would be great.