Students are starting to gear up for back to school, fresh from a long summer vacation. For the first couple of weeks, ambitious students will keep ahead of assignments but soon that momentum fades. What if you could earn $100 if you kept the momentum going?
It’s a bet Ultrinsic is willing to make with 34 new universities — including Stanford, Harvard, New York University, Columbia and Princeton — and hopefully online colleges soon.
Ultrinsic incentivizes students to achieve their academic goals by placing bets on grades. The site pays out more for A’s, less for B’s and so on. Students can even buy “grade insurance” for classes they might fail.
The system enables typically cash-strapped students to push themselves to succeed academically while earning some money. Ultrinsic’s CEO, Steven Wolf insists the site is providing incentives, not gambles — as online gambling is technically illegal in the US. ”There’s definitely a lot of variables, but the biggest variable is how much effort the student wants to put in,” Wolf says to the Huffington Post. “In general, if anybody would study 10 hours a day consistently for one class, they would get whatever grade they wanted to get.”
Students upload class schedules and provide Ultrinsic access to official records, then the site calculates the odds of success over failure and wagers a bet with students that start at $25.
Freshman have the opportunity to earn the most money with long shot bets. Freshman that bet $20 they will graduate with a 4.0 GPA could earn $2,000 but with 100:1 odds, according to the Huffington Post. For ambitious students, $2,000 is a great down payment on a car or apartment.
Ultrinsic is currently working with traditional, bricks-and-mortar schools to expand its reach. What if the website worked with online colleges to create a system to track progress throughout the semester? The better students performed in class, their odds and pay out would increase.
If you’ve already graduated with a bachelor’s or master’s degree, now might be the perfect opportunity to bet on yourself and finance your online PhD.
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