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.'"

Comments

Skill?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

When the course list says, "Staff" instead of a professor, luck factors in heavily here.

Re:Skill?

[ergrthjuyt]

As someone who makes hiring decisions and interviews prospects, I'm going to call bullshit. There is still real value in education. I won't hire people who think they're hot shit but haven't gone to college to get the ignorance schooled out of them.

Before I went to college for computer science, I knew everything. Then I learned otherwise. Now I owe my success to the skills I gained in college. You can't prove that with a piece of paper like a diploma, but there's some pretty damn good correlation, and I'll keep playing the odds with my hiring decisions, but thanks.

Are large numbers of stupid people graduating who don't deserve their degrees? Yes. Has higher education, to some degree, become commoditized and devalued?

Yes, but it does not follow that no learning occurs at universities.

Re:Skill?

[euphemistic]

Speak for yourself. Some of us actually took a lot of pleasure in getting a higher education and used it as a step to further self-development rather than just to land a higher-paying job. That part was just gravy. Having been in "the real world" of cubicles for a while now, I'm looking more and more forward to enrolling into a post-grad degree.

But this is from the perspective of somebody who went into University pursuing interests in the first place. And I'm glad I did. Maybe you'd have been happier if you did the same thing.

Re:Skill?

[russotto]

You go to school to buy a piece of paper to impress employers. Learning plays no factor in so-called modern education.

As someone who makes hiring decisions and interviews prospects, I'm going to call bullshit. There is still real value in education. I won't hire people who think they're hot shit but haven't gone to college to get the ignorance schooled out of them.

As someone who makes hiring decisions, you've proven the OPs point.

Re:Skill?

[Sarten-X]

I went into college knowing a lot, and also knowing that there was more out there I didn't know. During college, I increased the first quantity.

The most important skills I learned, in order:

1. Proper (or even merely acceptable) use of formal language can impress people.
2. Impressing people is an easy way to cut through bureaucracy and get a face-to-face talk with the people making decisions.
3. Those people are hidden at all levels of the bureaucracy.

I suppose I also learned how to win a programming contest. That accomplishment, more or less by itself, got me my last job interview.

Re:Skill?

[Mr. Freeman]

Just because you dropped out of college doesn't mean that it's worthless.

I'm not saying it's absolutely crucial for everyone to attend college, but it's mandatory for certain professions. For example, a mechanical engineer will have to know calculus, physics, and a lot of design principals. Are you seriously suggesting that this can be taught on the job? If so, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a lot of stuff that you need to know before you can actually do certain jobs, just because you don't have one of these jobs doesn't mean no one else does either.

I find that most people that rail against college are one of two types of people:
1. People that dropped out of college because they weren't smart enough or because they couldn't manage their time properly.
2. People with a job that doesn't require any college education.

The first type of person is just bitter that they couldn't handle it, the second type of person is too short sighted to see that there are jobs that require more book learning than theirs. They assume that because they learned how to wire a house on the job that an engineer can learn how to build a bridge on the job.

Re:Skill?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've proven that you're impressed by a piece of paper. It is interesting that your statement assumes someone is not ignorant simply because they've been to college, and consider anyone who hasn't been somehow intrinsically less qualified. Formal schooling is hardly the only avenue of learning. Perhaps if your interviewing process was better you could tell who was qualified and who wasn't without preconceptions based on their claims to education.

Re:Fine

[TubeSteak]

I bet $1 Billion you didn't RTFA.

Re:Fine

[e4g4]

You're absolutely right. I'm sure they didn't think of that massive loophole before putting this site together...

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

[Anarke_Incarnate]

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?

Shouldn't boggle your mind

[fishexe]

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)

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

[tlhIngan]

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.

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).