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Would You Bet On Your Own Intelligence?
By
Jaya Saxena
Published Aug 10, 2010
Modified Aug 10, 2010
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By
Jaya Saxena
Published Aug 10, 2010
Modified Aug 10, 2010
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How smart do you think you are, college kids? A new website that insists it is not a gambling website could pay you for that self-awareness, provided it's backed up by some actual knowledge. Ultrinsic allows students at 36 colleges, including NYU and Columbia, to bet money on their own grades. But do they really know what the odds are?
Students upload their class schedules and give Ultrinsic access to all their school records (?) so the site can calculate odds based on the student's previous grades, difficulty of the course and other factors. Wagers then start at a cap of $25, but can increase with use. The program can be particularly beneficial to freshmen; if they wager $20 they'll graduate with a 4.0, they can get $2,000 at graduation. But one student said Ultrinsic was bad at calculating things like grade inflation or easy professors. He was given 2-to-1 odds he wouldn't get an A- or higher in an African history class, but said most of the students ace. He said, "I shouldn't have made $100 on top of the $50 I got back."
Co-founder Jeremy Gelbart explains the inspiration on the site: "If I got an A on the exam, [CEO Steven Wolf] would give me $100, and if I didn't get an A, I would give him $20. Steven and I quickly realized that lots of other students might like this kind of motivation." Wolf also explains that it's not gambling, saying, "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...I'm just trying to say that the underlying concept is a little bit more than just making a bet—it's actually an incentive."
But considering the bad calculations, is it really all in the student's hands? And though they're trying to guard against it, what's to stop a kid from betting that he'll fail, and winning? Regardless, we're looking forward to the movie adaptation six years down the line.
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betting
college
gambling
grades
school
ultrinsic
Jaya Saxena
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