Bet On Your Grades

Ultrinsic is a new website that allows students to place bets on their grades:

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.

And there’s great news for all you overachieving 2014’s who, despite all the talk about Ivy League grade inflation, are going to have your dreams crushed when you learn that fewer than 1% of Cornell students graduate with >4.0 GPAs:

Ultrinsic saves its longest shots for fresh-faced high school graduates: If you wager $20 that you’ll finish college with a 4.0 GPA and follow through, you’ll get $2,000 when you graduate. At 100-1 odds, that’s about like a typical seven-team football parlay bet in Sin City. Instead of picking the right side in seven games, though, a student has to win in every class over an entire college career.

You can also purchase “grade insurance” by wagering that you’ll fail a class. I wonder: if getting a C or below constituted failing, what kind of bets would Cornell students be more likely to make?