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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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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"
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).