There is a widespread phenomenon among students unwilling to go to another early lecture to trade days of going to class with their friends: One friend might go to class on Tuesday, while the other attends on Thursday.
However, the days of alternating attendance in large lecture classes is gone due to Hopkins's increased use of electronic clicker devices.
Parts of a larger system of wired classrooms, these devices, called "Classroom Performance Systems," are small remotes which allow students to answer questions in class.
Once the professor designates a question as a "clicker question," students can then punch their answers into their clickers.
Through a receiver system that the professor has on his desk at the front of the class, he or she collects all the answers from the students.
Each clicker has a unique serial number that is registered online when the students buy the clicker at the school store, keeping students' answers anonymous to everyone except the professor.
Though the process seems simple enough, there has been recent debate over the small clickers and CPS program.
When students answer these questions, a professor automatically knows if students are in attendance.
But the Hopkins departments which use the program stress that attendance is not their primary purpose.
The main use of the clicker system is to "increase interaction between professors and students," said Bruce Barnett, a physics and astronomy professor.
But since these classes are upwards of 200 students, the professor has no way of knowing if a student is actually at the class or not. The professor would only sees that a student is answering the questions - but not who exactly is answering the questions. Effectively, this is cheating and is one of the program's downfalls.
In some classes, if students answer 75 percent of the questions, they receive full attendance credit.
But, "if kids want to go to class then they will go to class - you don't need [an electronic] system to force students to go," freshman Daksh Malhotra said. Malhotra is among the many students who use the CPS system in physics class.
Students who continue to attend class are forced to pay attention to the lecturer so that when asked a multiple-choice question, students can answer the question to the best of their ability.
"To me, the clickers seem to have two positive immediate effects. Firstly, more kids end up in class than there may be without them and secondly, it keeps students engaged and checks their knowledge on what the professor has done in class," freshman Max Trumble said.
The CPS program was created by Darrell Ward, who strived to create an audience response system in which students could openly answer questions while remaining anonymous to everyone else in the class. In this way, Ward's system has succeeded.
Only the professor knows students' answers, a key advantage to the use of CPS, especially in competitive classes where students may be more reluctant to raise their hands, and risk possibly being wrong in front of 200 other students.
Classes can also study the data once students punch in their answers because the program runs in real time.
A graph appears on the projector of how many students chose answers A, B, C, D or E.
The class can then analyze each answer and the professor can explain the difference between the right and wrong answers.
Happy with the system's capability of showing what questions students can and cannot comprehend, Barnett said, "[The system is] so the professor knows what students understand and don't understand.
Barnett has never lost any data and does not know of any colleagues who have had problems with using CPS.
While hundreds of colleges across the country use the CPS program with satisfied results, occasionally the system malfunctions.
The University of Kansas experienced such a failure recently when almost 1,000 students' grades in a biology class miraculously disappeared - every student's grade showed up as an A+.
But at Hopkins the program is used only for answering multiple-choice questions in class and not for exams so the risk of this type of malfunction is minor.
There is still an imminent chance of malfunction, which could hurt Hopkins students' attendance report and effectively their grades. Yet most professors still seem confident that the system will hold up its reputation.
