A website called Ultrinsic
is taking wagers on grades from students at 36 colleges nationwide starting this month.
Just as Las Vegas sports books set odds on football games, Ultrinsic will pay you top dollar for A’s, a little less for the more likely outcome of a B average or better, and so on. You can also wager you’ll fail a class by buying what Ultrinsic calls “grade insurance.”
CEO Steven Wolf insists this is not online gambling, which is technically illegal in the United States, because wagers with Ultrinsic involve skill.
Here’s how the website works: A student registers, uploads his or her schedule and gives Ultrinsic access to official school records. The 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.
Ultrinsic is currents available at the following schools:
- University of California-Berkeley
- University of Southern California
- Stanford University
- University of California-Los Angeles
- University of Connecticut
- Howard University
- American University
- George Washington University
- Georgetown University
- Indiana University-Bloomington
- Brandeis University
- Boston College
- Harvard University
- Boston University
- Michigan State University
- University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
- North Carolina State University
- University of North Carolina
- Wake Forest University
- Duke University
- Rutgers University
- CUNY Queens College
- SUNY Binghamton
- Syracuse University
- St. Johns University
- New York University
- Columbia University
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Pennsylvania
- Princeton University
- University of Texas-Austin
- Texas Tech University
- Texas A&M University
- Brigham Young University
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
