A few days ago I blogged about divorce insurance. Now we have another risk-management product: grade insurance. The people who run Ultrinsic don't describe their product that way. It's billed as a "motivator" that pays off if you get top grades. But, as HuffPost reports, you can also bet that you'll fail.

From Ultrinsic:

While hanging out together one Sunday afternoon, I mentioned to my friend Steven Wolf that I had an exam the following day and that if I were to study I was sure to get an A. (At the time, I was a student at University of Pennsylvania.) But I was enjoying my Sunday afternoon, and I told Steven that I had no intention of studying. That's when, in order to provide me with motivation, we made the following agreement: If I got an A on the exam, he would give me $100, and if I didn't get an A, I would give him $20. Steven and I quickly realized that lots of other students might like this kind of motivation. To that end, we began developing what is now Ultrinsic Motivator Inc. - Jeremy Gelbart

They're tried it out at Penn and NYU and say they're rolling it out this fall at more than 30 other, so-far unidentified schools. Googling "Johns Hopkins" and "Ultrinsic" turned up no relevant hits. To keep people from gaming the system, Ultrinsic says it has algorithms that account for prior performance of individual students and set the odds accordingly. So you have to "exceed expectations" (or sharply fall below them, if you bet on flunking) to make money.