Website Taking Bets in Order to Motivate Students

Sports betting getting a little too old for you? Do you need motivation to ace that mind-numbing class? Then you may want to swing by Ultrinsic, a website that will let students set wagers on their grades.

It all starts with having users sign up and give Ultrinsic access to their class schedules and school records. The site then uses these factors as well as other information that it can dig up on the classes and the students in order to calculate a certain grade. The student then decides how much he or she is willing to bet on it.

Needless to say, this has already sparked a debate among adults. Should this be considered as gambling and therefore be banned from campus? Or is it perfectly legit since students are relying solely on their skills and are betting on themselves?

[via TIME]

Students Lack Search Engine Savviness

It seems that students nowadays have become so used to the thought of the top being the best that they failed to see that the said notion doesn’t apply to search engine results.

A paper published in the International Journal of Communication revealed that in doing research, most students automatically click on the first generated result without so much as a second though on the source’s credibility. Out of the 102 college freshmen that were included in the study, only 10 percent acknowledge the author or the author’s credentials, while zero of the students actually verified the qualifications of their sources.

The solution that was offered to this problem fell on the educators. It was suggested that professors should inform students about the websites that are credible and the ones that are not. Still though, we think that students are already being spoon-fed with enough stuff and teaching them to scroll down further in the search page shouldn’t be part of the curriculum.

[via ArsTechnica]