2008 Woodie Awards
Students click in class with remotes
Issue date: 3/6/08
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.
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.
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