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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.'"
When the course list says, "Staff" instead of a professor, luck factors in heavily here.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
...this will go down in flames.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
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.
Is it proper for a school to, or appear to, allow a third party automated access to student records where this third party is not playing a role in providing education services.
Fight Spammers!
Who's the best at cheating?
Now cheating pays two-fold.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
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).
... an incentive to flunk.
Money where your mouse is?
What about betting on other students' grades? OK, we'll call it "investing": how about SHORTING the other students' grades?
samzenpus an F.
Assuming you reach your potential then -- if you are graded to a normal distribution -- it comes down to the luck of who is in your class as to where you end up.
I wonder if they would consider giving kickbacks to professors for failing students who've bet on themselves.
Bet $1Billion you will get an F, then don't show up for the exam. For that kind of sum I won't bother repeating the year - in fact, I won't bother even going back to school.
My rights don't need management.
Real gambling involves skill too. I know an amateur who is very good at poker, and he can make money with it (not alot, but when you regularly come out ahead, that's skill).
This is gambling. Whether or not it's ok is another question, but the fact that this guy says "it's not gambling" makes me suspect the whole outfit. This is a business, and they are playing the odds that students don't hit the mark.
Not to mention the privacy concerns. From ultrinsic
Couple that with your entire school records, and you have given this company your identity information. Do you trust them with that? Maybe you should read the terms of service on their signup page
If this does go forward, how long will it be before we hear about their new Academic History Database, now available to employers for a hefty annual subscription or by a per usage fee.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Easiest way to make a sure buck ever: just convince the professor to fix your grades and give him/her part of the profit.
You don't even have to be that pernicious-- just ask the professor how many points you'd have to lose to get a sure B or C, and then ensure you get a B or C.
Bet enough and you won't even care what grades you decide to give yourself since you won't have to work.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
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
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
This will let teachers troll for payoff kickbacks, a good-size scandal is almost certain.
You don't even have to be that pernicious-- just ask the professor how many points you'd have to lose to get a sure B or C, and then ensure you get a B or C.
Pretty sure you are wagering against "B or better" and not "B- to B+", otherwise someone with good grades could wager heavily against getting and F get good odds and 'take a dive' for a huge payout.
Still, profs are human too, and can be bribed like anyone else. I would guess that you are wagering against you total GPA though.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
FTFA:
Of course, if you happen to take a class with a teacher that NEVER gives A's, then it doesn't matter HOW good you are (unless you're the second coming of Dykstra?), and yes, I had a few of those in Undergrad (for required classes).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
if you bet, then intuitively there is some factor of luck involved. however, you dont get your grades in school by luck. it is under your control. however i have to say there is luck sometimes, in that some teachers are better than others and your grade depends on who your teacher is. some teachers explain things clearly and can break down any subject to your level of understanding, and others are just there because they have tenure. so there is luck in that respect. but overall it is up to the students.
http://weboven.blogspot.com
Will this end up like the mob with blackmail and people taking a dive?
will the site pay professors to lower grades to get out having to make pay outs?
with the colleges put a stop to this?
grades from students at 36 American colleges.
Are these colleges whose professors will be sure to include some subjective questions on every test and take a kickback in exchange for subtracting points from a student's grade?
For this 'betting' company to be profitable, the students have to lose most of the time....
Oh right, it's this "betting" thing that makes it gambling. There is skill involved, but like in Poker, there is a huge element of random chance involved as well (what questions get chosen to be asked on the test), and how the student reacts sometimes based on hunch to things that are unknown and things that are known.
The student could be extremely skilled, but too many unfair or 'unbeatable' (despite skill) questions got placed on (possibly rigged) tests.
E.g. Student doesn't know answer to multiple-choice question #23... do they just lose, or do they enter a random answer, and hope for the best? (Element of chance)
HTH: I don't buy the argument that it's not gambling, and I question whether a judge or other authorities would buy that argument, also.
You should have learned in your studies, when you permit external access security is compromised.
Not to say that school has good security, but it creates another potential attack vector.
Fight Spammers!
Why not just have students pay a scaling subscription fee? You pay your $50/mo (or $25, or $200, whatever) and if you get an A they pay for a percentage of your tuition based on your subscription rate.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
There's no way for this to escape regulation by definition chasing. It's either gambling, or it's insurance.
I've sat an exam once or twice where almost no one finished the exam in the allotted time because there was too much material.
The professors heavily curved the exam grades in that case.
It's not common, but there is a bit of an art to properly designing an exam so that it can be completed by students who have what should be an acceptable level of mastery of the material, in the given time.
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?
Or team based where others can make your grade go up or down.
The site also allows professors to take the other side of the bet.
... if the professors look like this.
Have gnu, will travel.
Obviously the prejudice of a professor can play heavily upon grades. Most of us have seen it in action. Sometimes it's the old guy who gives great grades to pretty girls and hates anyone on the football team. The next time around may be the opposite. Perhaps only the football team gets a break on grades. The point being that it is flat out bonkers to think that the student is the only one in charge of his grades.
Can you sell yourself short?
Actually, the whole thing smells of insider trading.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
He said nothing about what school you went to or how you got your degree. I can get a BS in many things from respectable online schools that are just as legit as actually being on campus. The only things that are sometimes hard to do are practical application but many programs offer ways to do that too. The Vet Tech school my wife is looking at lets her do her practicals at many local or at least relatively local practicing vets.
But they got passed over because they obvious either are unqualified or they obviously do not have the self drive to get that "meaningless" piece of paper that is worth so much money (poor decision making skills). And before you play the affordability game, it is very easy to work your way through school if you are willing to go to a local community college and then a state school.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
+1. I've met people in their 30s still working on their degrees who were excellent programmers, and people fresh out of tech school who couldn't tell a compiler from their ass. It's not about paying tribute, its about showing you're not stuck up enough to actually shut up and try to learn something.
A small minority can also learn everything they need to on the job, but they'd have to be exceptionally driven, humble, and intelligent to be able to reach their full potential that way.
They'd better only allow bets of the form "grade is at least x"; otherwise I can just see the "WTF the professor gave me an A+ instead of an A? ARGGHHH!"...
You make awfully good points but with awfully bad grammar. I'm guessing you are one of the people that didn't want the loans, went to a tech school, or otherwise didn't get an education and was passed over for a job.
The parent had a point, and you completely missed it because you don't know what you don't know... and it showed in your post.
Access to School Account. By providing Ultrinsic with your username and password for your online school account, you authorize Ultrinsic to access the account and to view and record any information in your account.
There's a lot they can potentially access beyond a simple transcript and course schedule. At least at my school, computer lab logins, library account, tuition and fees, financial aid, even purchasing a parking permit is all done through the same UN/PW pair.
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.
Meanwhile over here in Sweden higher education is still free and you get some money to get by with + loan opportunities.
Loans or not are up to you, it may be stupid to take the courses if you 1) won't make any money while taking them, 2) have to loan a bunch of money and 3) don't think the advantage of having taken them will render the former two non-issues.
Call me when there's enough in the pot to make it profitable enought to "throw the match". No, you won't get your BS degree, but if you walk with a big enough purse, do you really care? Audit the rest of your courses and/or get an internship someplace if you still want to pull in some more bills.
Computer Science:
It is not what you think it is. They were learning algorithms and theory, mathematics and data structures.
You were doing MIS based things.
What if they were using IRIX or Solaris? Would you have been at home on those systems?
Here's how Wolf says the website works: A student registers, uploads his or her schedule and gives Ultrinsic access to official school records. The New York-based site then calculates odds based on the student's college history and any information it can dig up on the difficulty of each class, the topic and other factors. The student decides how much to wager up to a cap that starts at $25 and increases with use.
Presumably, bets on classes taught by the harder professors would pay more for an A? I wonder if the tenure and promotion committee would be interested in the published odds?
Computer Science is now more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Typical problem of universities (I've also studied at a university myself): they teach how/why stuff works from a highly theoretical pov, not how it is used in practice. This gives a great basis for deeper understanding but most practical things are not learned in university but in real life.
It doesn't surprise me much. I went to school from EE & CmpE, but the department had absorbed the CS program and I knew/worked with most of those students as well. I would say that 50% of the CS grads were one-trick ponies. They could hack together a program in MFC and that was it. They've probably gone on to be managers :-) Day to day IT work (building computers, installing software, setting up networks, etc) is not taught in a CS program -- it is IT, not CS, after all -- but one does kind of expect people in the CS field to at least have a minimal IT competence, right?
There were, of course, a few CS people I thought very highly of and would hire in a minute, including a guy who I would definitely hire if I ever wanted to knock over the world's banks. (Seems like there is always one brilliant and misguided computer hacker in every class.) On the other hand, there were definitely some class anchors. One guy I remember asking me a question that floored me. Bear in mind, this came from a senior CS major, final semester, in an advanced compilers class. "I just read the project assignment but...what's a command prompt?" Really. He wasn't faking. He'd never done any programming in anything but a GUI, never done any manual debugging, and had only ever owned a Mac.
I changed gears for grad school (physics / nuclear) and then law school, but I always loved the low-level CS/CmpE stuff. Chip design, assembly programming (barring the x86 instruction set - blech), electronics/software interfacing. Kind of miss it, especially when I get some cool project idea in my head and have zero equipment to implement it with.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Maybe they were taught computer science, and not IT administration? I think it would be pretty pathetic to teach Windows installation in a CS course. (Although I admit, it shows their laziness and lack of interest to not bother to learn that simple stuff on their own.)
Typical problem of universities (I've also studied at a university myself): they teach how/why stuff works from a highly theoretical pov, not how it is used in practice. This gives a great basis for deeper understanding but most practical things are not learned in university but in real life.
There is no way that a University can teach the practical skills for the wide variety of jobs available. Either you would end up so specialized that you would have to go get another 'degree' if you wanted to move into an adjacent field, or they would need to make it so generic that you would have to create specialized schools for each... and we are back at the same problem.
If you want practical, go to a tech school. If you have an interest in a field and want more of the theory/traditional education, college is for you.
Neither should have a stigma, we need good technical workers. They certainly command a decent paycheck.
Dont turn college into a vocational training center, trying that and denigrating votech has really hurt our educational system.
(sorry for typos, injured my hands)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Let there be a student s that does this for each semester over 4 consecutive years. Assume that the website loses $k each year that the student gambles. Further, assume that the site does nothing with the data for the next 10 years. How much will the website make off of student s over the course of the remainder of student s lifetime?
It is given (in the article summary) that the website requires access to official records, so they will have verified data.
They can sell this information for a good bit of money every time student s looks for a job over the rest of his/her lifetime!
Sounds like a bad Ponzi Scheme. Any college student smart enough to be confident they'll get good grades is also smart enough not to fall for such a scam. Or maybe the founders just expect that many kids to be fail out on both counts?
Um..because they did not go to a big 4 year school and someone else did? It's like asking why the person with the shifty eyes, the funny smell, or the lack of professional references keeps being passed up over other people. Hiring involves a selection process, not simply picking a random person who claims he/she can do the job reliably for the long term. If you're hiring and you want a person that doesn't smells odd or you do want to have a person with a college degree because you believe they'll relate better with all the current college graduate staff, you'll make a choice of them over others.
Put more simply. Life isn't fair. Hiring and firing doubly so.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
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?
Because they type like you and still expect to be taken seriously?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
It boggled my mind that people who have no idea how to use a computer were getting degrees in computer science.
"Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes." --Edsger Dijkstra
(something you might know if you'd taken more CS courses)
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
2. Bet double your accumulated tuition cost, and then overload on your mickey mouse degree classes.
...why stop at double?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
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.
During my CS degree at around the same timeframe, the only computers we touched were running SunOS and, later, Solaris. There's nothing there that can prepare you for the brain-dead behaviour of Microsoft installers.
(True fact: I spent a day yesterday trying to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1... turns out Windows Update has a default size limit for updates that's smaller than the size of the service pack, so it fails to install it unless you hack the registry to put on a larger limit)
When you get into higher and higher education, you always feel that the previous educational level was much easier than the current one. You learn more in Primary School than in Kindergarten, you learn more in High School than in Primary School and then you learn more in University than in High School.
Now it is not at all surprising, that you may learn more at your first job than at your University. Learning process accelerates (at least you feel so).
Also, take into consideration that when you learn purely theoretic stuff, then you learn not just that stuff itself, but you are exercising your abstraction capabilities. Just remember how strange and foreign some concepts sounded at the beginning of the University, and how natural they became at the end of it! It is not about "I will never ever use [insert your fav. theorem here] in my life", it is about preparing your brain for interpreting abstractions.
Certainly this was a good post. Pretty good information shared. Thanks for the article. Keep it up the good work. http://www.online-insurance-quotes.org/
I think the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights says it best: "No person may be forced to install or have installed on any machine Microsoft Windows 95 or any derivative of it under any circumstance, no matter what they have done". There is also a special declaration of suggested physical punishment for Windows ME...
1) because most people overestimate their own skills, and
2) compulsive gamblers would use this service to their own demise because they're too busy gambling at the casino to study anyway
3) they obviously try to stack the odds against you in the first place
Oh come on, any engineer or scientist should have been able to install Windows 95. There's nothing especially wonderful about computer science that means you have to cultivate an Olympian disregard for the everyday world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Right. Should we use the highly skilled and therefore highly compensated computer scientist to install windows 95. Or should we get the "computer guy" to do it, since we can get away with paying him much less? If you were running a business with those resources available, wouldn't you allocate them in a similar fashion?
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.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Think of the trauma that kids will face when they find out Grandma is betting against them.
I can get a BS in many things from respectable online schools that are just as legit as actually being on campus.
Roflmao. I have attempted to try this myself. I got good grades (because I called the "instructors" on their bullshit), but found myself teaching the teacher and taking the teachers part in the online discussion, because all they did was cut and paste crappy discussion questions from past classes that didn't even pertain to what was being discussed. They would grade hard at the beginning of the class ( often counting things wrong that were not wrong, such as when a teacher tried to tell me that drivers and applications were not software) and easy at the end of the class to simulate improvement. They would cut and paste previous feedback on assignments that either didn't match the assignment or were completely general, almost like a John Edward routine. It was ridiculous. And it was a well known online school, who charge MORE for this crap than a conventional university and continue to take Pell grants and federally subsidized loans despite horrid drop out rates as students realize what a joke it is.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
So exactly how does your car get its internet connection then? Or does it connect to other hot spots and then provide that signal to your devices? Or is this supposed to use one of the new wireless protocols like WiMAX or something? I didn't think those were all that operational yet? Will this be a subscription based service offered by Audi, like OnStar or something? Article seemed a bit light on details.
Practical stuff is learned on the job because one employer's method is different from another employer's method.
Perhaps a good example would be a simple job of "programmer". If you want a code monkey to crank out code based on your designs and existing codebase, someone from college/university wouldn't fit. You'd want someone from a trade school who's basically trained in whatever lanugage you want to do it.
The college/university student will handle codemonkey, but will take longer as they'll have to learn the language first (very rarely do they come out with more than one of C/C++, Java or .NET, while your trade school graduate can come out with a combination of C/C++, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, etc.).
Perhaps a car analogy is more appropriate. If you want a mechanic to work on your car, you hire someone who's gone to a trade school and become a certified mechanic. However, if you want a new type of car, you have to hire automotive engineers who can design a car and understand all the physics and the like of cars to make a safe, fuel-efficient etc car. That automotive engineer probably can't rebuild an engine, but he'll know all the parts and what they do. Just like the mechanic can rebuild the engine, but won't have insight into why things are done the way they are (e.g., why the engine has so many sensors and is completely computer-controlled).
ehh... installing software isn't computer science. Granted I'd expect most people who have a computer science degree to be capable of installing software, but its sort of like complaining that a guy with a mechanical engineering degree is taking his car to a mechanic.
I've been employed writing software for 10 years, and during that time my job has never required me to install windows on a computer, there are other people paid to do that.
Damn! Three months after I graduate!
Gambling means that the event has a significant random factor. Any course where the prof grades on a curve would prove to create random shifts in results against a class not graded on that curve. This is not a game of skill.
Students have to register, upload their schedule, and give the site access to official school records.So much for the fifth amendment.
So how was it in the past?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
eh, shoddy typing on my part. *no
Are you trying to infer that it's not modern, or that it's not education?
See, if you'd gone to college you'd be able to convey your meaning more clearly.
Hell, if I'd gone to college I'd know the differencce between "infer and "imply".
I spent my time and money buying real MIPS and SPARC hardware for running IRIX and Solaris, instead of spending it at University. That and reading documentation and watching MIT OCW and UCB Webcast.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Was it Pheonix by any chance? That sounds right up their alley.
However I made my point poorly. You can get a degree from many respectable brick and mortar schools online. Schools like Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon are just a few of the major schools that have online programs. In fact the vast majority of major colleges offer online education now.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Seriously, nobody sees a problem with this? What's to stop me from betting against somebody in my class, then spending the semester making them tank, or explaining stuff wrong to them??? Wanna divide a B Class IP address into 50 subnets? No problem, just divide it by 50.............now hold on while I go make a few quick bets...
Yeah, good idea.
The company I worked for was making 125 an hour for my time.
The "highly compensated computer scientists" were fresh out of school doing Visual Basic. I was earning more than them AFTER the company took the huge cut of the money.